Nvidia is constructing one of the largest server farms in Israel, close to the Elyakim Interchange near Yokne’am in the north of the country. The Data Center Engineering Facility will for the first time deploy Nvidia’s new Blackwell processors. Industry sources estimate the total investment in the project at over $500 million.
The facility is located in a logistics building belonging to real estate company Shoval Investment and Management that was converted to a data center, in the Mevo Carmel Science and Industry Park between Elyakim and Kibbutz Ramat Hashofet. In its full configuration the facility will consume 30 megawatts per hour, putting it on a par with what is currently Israel’s largest data center, Schonfeld Engineering’s SDS server farm in Modi’in, which also consumes 30 megawatts an hour. For the sake of comparison, the power consumption of Amazon’s three server farms in Israel is 12 megawatt-hours each.
The new Blackwell processors that will be installed in Nvidia’s data center are graphics processors with a computing capacity four times stronger than the processors in the company’s Israel 1 supercomputer for AI model training, and thirty times stronger for AI inference tasks. The facility will not only house and cool servers, but will also contain development laboratories and offices. As far as is known, it will serve Nvidia’s needs only, and will not host data for external entities.
The Mevo Carmel industrial park is jointly owned by four local authorities: Yokne’am Illit, Daliyat al-Karmel, Isfiya, and the Megiddo Regional Council.
Built in less than a year
The new site was constructed within less than a year, and will start to operate in the first half of this year, supporting expansion of Nvidia’s research and development activity in Israel.
It is believed that the server farm will be equipped with several thousand Blackwell and more advanced Grace Blackwell processors, alongside Nvidia Israel’s communications processors Spectrum, DGX Quantum, BlueField, and SuperNIC, in the largest concentration in Israel. The new facility will be stronger in its computing and processing power than Nvidia’s Israel 1 supercomputer, which last November became the 34th strongest computer in the world. Israel 1 contains over 2,000 of Nvidia’s previous generation of graphics processors, H100 and BlueField, and is sited at the company’s offices in Yokne’am.
The systems and labs at the new site will serve Nvidia’s dozens of engineering and product groups in developing new technologies- hardware and software technologies for accelerated communications, processor design, AI software, and so on.
Nvidia confirmed the construction of the data center this morning. "Our employees are our most important resource, and we are committed to continued investment in them," said Amit Krig, SVP networking software and Nvidia-Israel site leader. "The new research, development and engineering site will enable Nvidia’s thousands of employees in Israel, and the many who will join later, to continue developing the technologies that drive artificial intelligence, the most important technological power of our time."
Published by Globes, Israel business news - en.globes.co.il - on January 15, 2025.
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