"People don't come to Nvidia just to earn a little more"

Amit Krig  credit: Shlomi Yosef
Amit Krig credit: Shlomi Yosef

Nvidia SVP Amit Krig talks to "Globes" about the company's extraordinarily rapid expansion in Israel and its appeal to employees.

In recent months, Amit Krig, SVP networking software and site leader of Nvidia's Israel development center (formerly Mellanox), has found himself traveling a great deal between lower Yokne’am, where the company's renovated headquarters are located, and the nearby Mevo Carmel Science and Industry Park. Over the past year, Nvidia has been covertly building a huge facility there, to house the most advanced servers and chips it has to offer.

According to industry estimates, Nvidia invested no less than half a billion dollars in building the facility, which included bringing its new server cooling technology to Israel. However, just days before the announcement, Nvidia found itself at the forefront of a battle of ideas with the outgoing American administration when US President Joe Biden decided to limit the export of graphics processors (GPUs) to 170 countries around the world, including Israel, and to grant benefits to giant corporations that set up their server farms in the 18 countries considered to be close allies, of which Israel is not one.

Last Monday, Nvidia, which is considered the biggest victim of the move, released an angry response. Krig, who has seen the huge investment Nvidia is pouring into Israel -now the company's third-largest development center and the second largest outside the US- also criticizes the decision.

"Regulation will harm innovation and growth "

"Companies, startups and universities all over the world as well as in Israel are leveraging artificial intelligence to advance in important areas such as medicine, agriculture, education and industry," he says in an exclusive interview with "Globes." "This drives growth and helps countries realize their potential. Now, the new regulation, which seeks to limit access to standard computing applications, could harm innovation and economic growth worldwide."

Since it published its comments on the issue last Monday, and since the publication of the Biden administration guidelines, which calmed industry concerns slightly, Nvidia's stock on Wall Street has climbed by about 5%.

Would Krig's boss, the company's energetic founder Jensen Huang, have approved the construction of the large server facility had he known about the Biden administration's restrictions? Krig refuses to answer the question, but the answer is simple: were it not for the Mellanox acquisition in Yokne’am for $6.9 billion about five years ago, Nvidia probably would not have invested billions in Israel. It might not even have acquired two Israeli software companies last year, Run:ai and Deci, for a combined $1.1 billion.

Nvidia Israel, which began as Mellanox where Krig was a senior vice president, has become a goose that lays golden eggs for Nvidia: in the first nine months of 2024, it contributed about 11% of revenue, or $10 billion. Its communications processors, which pave the way for information running between Nvidia's graphics processors, have become one of the best-selling products among Nvidia's major customers, including other giants such as Microsoft, OpenAI, and Meta.

In essence, the fact that Nvidia controls the entire value chain, from graphics processors, through communications processors to the software layer, now allows it to sell supercomputers or cloud services from start to finish, as a product or service for the largest companies underpinning the artificial intelligence revolution. Nvidia has more than once suffered from this, undergoing investigation by the US Department of Justice on suspicion of being a monopoly, including in the matter of the Run:ai acquisition, which was eventually completed.

Nvidia is considered the fastest-growing company in Israel among the international giants. Krig highlights the importance of Nvidia's Israeli development center by citing the homegrown "Israel-1" supercomputer. Israel-1 was inaugurated a month after the October 7 massacre, and a year later was ranked the 34th most powerful supercomputer in the world. "The computer was built as a template for Nvidia, intended to define how its future supercomputers should be built," Krig reveals. "Nvidia's largest supercomputers today are based on things we discovered in Israel-1."

Nvidia Israel expected to lead

Supercomputers are much more than graphics processors; they also include software, an operating system, communications processors and switches whose job is to manage the processing of a large number of graphics processors, synchronize the transfer of information between them, and ensure that the rate and power of calculation remain stable. Krig compares the processors and communications switches in Israel-1 to a complex highway network: each car is a piece of data that wishes to move from one graphics processor to another, while the processors and communications switches are the traffic lights, roads, and junctions of the information world.

"Think about a lot of cars leaving home at once and getting stuck at a congested intersection. The technology we developed creates a dialogue between endpoints, so that instead of an intersection with four lanes in each direction, we can instantly create hundreds of lanes at the problem points. If we rearrange the priorities -what information needs to go through first, through which lane and when- we can greatly reduce these traffic jams."

"Technologically, we at Nvidia Israel are expected to be world leaders," says Krig. "We need to bring the newest, fastest, and highest quality technology possible, with a reliability level that is well above 99%. The new Mevo Carmel facility will have a great deal of computing power, which will enable us to develop Nvidia's next technologies in Israel, in communications, core processors, and artificial intelligence."

The Mevo Carmel facility will house hundreds of server racks, each with 72 new Blackwell processors, the cost of which is estimated in the hundreds of millions of dollars. This March, Huang may launch more innovative processors at the GTC 2025 conference. Nvidia refuses to give any hints about the launches, or say which of its future products will come to the new facility.

The fact that so many other companies depend on Nvidia for AI processors has made you a kind of bottleneck. Meaning, a delay in the launch of Blackwell processors, for example, slows down innovation at the tech giants.

"We don't look at it that way. We don't think about everyone being dependent on us. Our daily business is all about how to make the next system even better and more energy efficient. We get up in the morning, live and breathe around how we can improve our products."

Amazon now offers competing GPUs at a third of Nvidia’s price, and Broadcom and Marvell are already developing graphics processors for some of your customers.

"Competition is an excellent thing. Today's reality wouldn’t exist without it. We try to produce the most efficient product, from price level to value. Efficiency is one metric we look at constantly. It's true there are competitors, but I think that today there’s no single company that does everything and looks at the entire solution as one piece. And that's our advantage: the complete solution, from the silicon level to the system level, including a software package that’s important for diagnostics and fault tolerance."

"Waiting with bated breath for Avinatan Or"

Nvidia is also one of the many companies in Israel that has an employee kidnapped to Gaza. Avinatan Or was kidnapped on October 7 from the Nova festival along with his girlfriend Noa Argamani, who was rescued in June. Or was hired by Nvidia as he was concluding his studies in electrical engineering at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. Just before he was kidnapped, Or was part of the development team working on Nvidia’s communications card (the Spectrum Ethernet switch). Or’s name has been included in the list of hostages who will be released only in the second phase of the current deal with Hamas, after a 42-day ceasefire, and on condition that the ceasefire is maintained.

"At seven o'clock that Saturday morning, my wife woke me, and we realized quickly this was closely connected to us," says Krig. "At that time, videos began to be released, including the famous video in which Noa and Avinatan are seen being kidnapped together, and then the official confirmation of his kidnapping came. The information about the murder of Danielle Waldman (daughter of Mellanox founder Eyal Waldman - A.G) and her partner, Noam, also reached us quickly. Jensen (Huang) was updated that same day. We quickly divided the company into sectors, the human resources team called each of the employees in Israel to locate everyone, understand what they needed, what the challenges were, and who was being drafted into the reserves."

Since then, Nvidia has been in constant contact with the Or family. "It’s with us daily. Almost every day since October 7, employees have come from the central region, the north, and the south, to stand with the family outside military headquarters as a sign of solidarity."

Nvidia is one of two major international companies to have an employee kidnapped in Gaza. The other is Amazon, which adopted a policy of silence about the kidnapping of Sasha Troufanov, also a chip developer. Without mentioning Amazon, Krig says, "We spoke with the family before we came out and publicly identified with them and their son publicly. We don't know what’s right or wrong in this context, but it’s important to us to support the family. This is what is right for them, and it’s a step they support."

What’s in store for Avinatan at Nvidia when he comes back?

"We’re waiting for him here, with bated breath. My pulse starts racing when I think about him coming home and to Nvidia."

Although the war played havoc with Nvidia Israel, the company continued to grow, and recruited about 500 employees in 2024. "High-tech companies in these sorts of situations try to do risk management, and understand what will happen to various aspects, such as production and operations. For example, understand what will happen if the power goes out at one of our sites, where our data is stored. And of course, we were also built in advance for extreme situations," says Krig.

Nvidia's largest development center in Israel is in Yokne’am, a hot spot for Hezbollah's missile attacks on the northern border in the fall of 2024. The multiplicity of strategic sites near Yokne’am and the western Jezreel Valley led to many missile and drone attacks, but these did not have much operational impact, claims Krig. "We had maybe four or five air raid sirens. We were here in 2006, when the company was still Mellanox. and we went into shelters then, too."

How do you inform your management abroad about air raids and drone attacks?

"The management understands this is a very complex situation. It knows Israel has a successful air defense system but that there can also be vulnerabilities. We consider all scenarios, and at critical times we’ve asked people to stay home. Like everyone else, we’ve also had Zoom meetings interrupted by sirens. This is a reality that I very much hope we’ll soon put behind us. But we received a lot of love, reinforcement, and support from abroad -and there was no panic."

Did the Israeli center receive any concessions compared with other development centers in the world because of the war?

"I and my managers were of one mind: Don't make it easier on us in any way. If we need anything, we’ll ask. We don't want to miss any meetings, because it’s important to us that the site continues to produce. The reality is that we met all the goals. I can't say that we didn't shift priorities and pull teams from one project to another, but the bottom line is that we met all of our goals. For example, the Israel-1 supercomputer went into operation in November 2023, three weeks ahead of schedule."

A complicated childhood and the move from Intel to Mellanox

Krig lives in Kiryat Tivon with his wife and three children. She was the first female field spotter (tatzpitanit ) in the IDF, the first female officer in that discipline, and later trained an entire generation of female field spotters.

Krig has been with Mellanox since its first year of existence. He was part of its big exit to Nvidia and holds a position as vice president that allows him to report directly to Huang. Underlying his success story is a complex childhood and an unconventional biography. He was born in Haifa 49 years ago, his parents divorced when he was three years old and his father moved to South Africa. Krig grew up with his mother in the rough Khalisa neighborhood and when he was in second grade, he went to live with his father's parents in the Romema neighborhood on the Carmel.

He arrived at Mellanox after attending a job fair in 1998. "It was Intel's heyday, when anyone who got a job there wouldn't leave. Flagship processors were bestsellers back then. It was raining that day, and they were offering branded umbrellas at the Mellanox booth. The person handing them out was Eitan Rabin, who still works at the company today. He handed me an umbrella and said that if I was looking for a job, I should leave a resume and they would get back to me. I‘d never heard the name Mellanox before, but when I got back to the apartment with a friend from Intel, Erez Cohen, who also works at Nvidia today, we each received a call from Nicole, who was Mellanox's human resources manager then."

Within a few days, the two were interviewed, offered jobs, and asked to start working almost immediately. "It was the strangest start in the world," says Krig. "We came from Intel, a place where security people walk around all day and everything is organized like an American corporate office. And when I arrived, they gave me a bunch of keys and said, 'Here’s the key to get in and out, and here’s the code for the alarm when the day is over.'"

Krig joined Mellanox in the summer of 1998, when it had only about 70 employees, as one of its first five software people. "They told me, 'Listen, we’re not sure if there’s enough work for the software people, so if you don't have anything to do, help out the people in the IT department ' Today, the center that used to be Mellanox has more software people than hardware people."

He started as a software engineer writing libraries and drivers, went on to manage the entire verification (solution validation) division, and moved on to project management with large customers such as Microsoft, Dell, and HP. From 2013 until now, Krig and Dror Goldenberg shared the most senior management positions at Mellanox. Today at Nvidia Israel, they report directly to Huang: Krig as manager of all software aspects of the communications processors, and Goldenberg as manager of the architecture group.

"The Nvidia connection brought something different"

In the years when Mellanox was a public company and was under the watchful and critical eye of hedge fund Starboard Value, Krig briefly became CFO and focused on finding ways to become more efficient. Today, Krig, in addition to being a senior vice president responsible for all network interface software activity, is also the director of Nvidia's development center at all its sites in Israel: Yokne’am, Tel Aviv, Be'er Sheva and near the Tel Hai College in Kiryat Shmona.

Mellanox was sold to Nvidia in 2019 for $6.9 billion, and the acquisition is considered its biggest in terms of revenue contribution. Earlier this year, it was reported that Mellanox accounted for $13 billion in revenue last year, and according to Nvidia’s latest quarterly report, revenue doubled from $5 billion to $10 billion during the first three quarters of the year.

Critics often claim that, had Mellanox continued to be traded on Nasdaq and to operate as an independent company, it could have doubled or tripled its value, and become the largest publicly traded Israeli company. "Mellanox could have been a giant company in Israeli terms," admits Krig, "and it could have been very successful as an independent company. But the connection with Nvidia brought something different. It gave us something that I don't know if we would have seen as an independent company. Something about the way the Nvidia is run and the connection to it opened avenues for us that I’m not sure we would have been able to reach on our own."

The Nvidia brand probably helps recruit employees that you might have had a hard time recruiting without it.

"Right. The company would have been successful, but the brand is significant -it plays a part. And Nvidia has a far more global and bigger brand name than Mellanox."

Nvidia was the company that recruited the most Intel employees during that company’s crisis. Did you attract the best employees?

"We had no specific goal of recruiting employees from Intel and we didn’t go head hunting for them. We’ve recruited many hundreds of employees in the past year, and it’s possible that anyone who came from Intel with a suitable resume was eventually hired. Unfortunately, there were many people at Intel who left, and everyone found their place. I say this with a great deal of sorrow because Intel is a place that I hold in high esteem, where professional engineers come from, and I also worked there early on. We have more than 4,500 employees in Israel, and we crossed the 4,000-mark right during the war."

Will you end 2025 with 5,000 employees like Jensen Huang said?

"That's a reasonable assumption; we have 300 open positions."

Where will you find so many people? There’s a limited number of workers in processors, and there are huge companies like Apple, Amazon, Google and even Microsoft, competing for every talent. On the other hand, junior staffers, university graduates, don’t get a first opportunity the way it was in the past, and there’s a lot of unemployment in the sector.

"We’re not just looking for chip engineers, we have quite a few software people, even more than hardware and systems people. But our DNA, ever since we were Mellanox, is that we recruit students and young interns. We believe in abilities that come together with a desire to succeed quickly, and in fact our best investment is in recruiting interns, students, and new graduates. We recruit hundreds of them a year."

"Share price isn’t watercooler talk here"

There’s a strong economic incentive to work at Nvidia. Aren't you afraid people will come to work for Nvidia just for the shares?

"There is an economic incentive, but it’s a sign that there’s a successful company here that people want to be a part of. I don't think people come here because they earn a little more. They want to be part of a company that’s successful and leading a technological revolution. We do our best in our hiring interviews to understand why they’ve come to us, what their history is. And if part of their interest is economic, that’s not wrong in my opinion. It’s fine for a person to say they believe in the company, and want shares because they’re sure it will succeed. But is the watercooler conversation here about share price? Absolutely not. Walk around here and you’ll see people talking about technology and the next goal they need to achieve."

There is criticism that your bonuses are low relative to the industry. Right now, the stock is going up, but what will happen when it doesn't?

"We believe that a stock-based compensation system is excellent."

Israel is falling behind in international AI indexes, ranking somewhere between Saudi Arabia and the Czech Republic. According to a report by the State Comptroller at the end of this past year, the government’s AI programs have been underfunded and mismanaged. What should the government do?

"The first thing that’s needed is support for national infrastructure, for example, power infrastructure that will support the establishment of data centers, not only for the sake of establishing them but so that expertise is created in establishing them. Also, providing support for entrepreneurs so they can establish more companies. The implications of data centers go far beyond the high-tech industry. In academic institutions, for example, many researchers are thirsty for computing power on which they can build and run artificial intelligence models, and they are forced to stand in endless queues to use those supercomputers. And to meet the short amount of time they’re allocated, they reduce their working models, but that way, it comes out less accurate. By the time they get to run the model again, the achievements will be forgotten, and then researchers give up on their research. That’s why power infrastructure is important, with as much emphasis as possible on green energy. These are very large investments and the state must encourage and do this as quickly as possible.

"The second thing the state can do is to make artificial intelligence accessible to more people, to startups, to institutions and academic institutions, and also to software developers. This will lead to a significant increase in qualified engineers in this field."

Last year, Nvidia acquired two Israeli companies for a total of $1.1 billion: Run:ai, a developer of technology that makes the use of graphics processors more efficient, thereby eliminating the need to purchase a larger quantity of chips, and Deci, a company which has developed an artificial intelligence processing accelerator that allows models to be trained more quickly.

Nvidia has unofficially established a large artificial intelligence software development center that employs hundreds of employees and deals with aspects not related directly to Nvidia's core activities in Israel that are based on Mellanox: communications chips.

The acquisition of Run:ai itself was a rocky one as the US regulators feared that Nvidia was trying to eliminate its competition, but the purchase was ultimately approved after the company promised that its product would continue to serve competing companies and would operate as an independent product.

Krig neither confirms nor denies the intention to establish a software development center, but he explains the rationale behind the acquisition of the Israeli companies: "Run:ai and Deci were acquired because of their technology, not because they were Israeli. What's true is that we have a fairly large site here, capable of absorbing these sorts of companies and integrating them properly. That’s hard to do from a distance."

Published by Globes, Israel business news - en.globes.co.il - on January 21, 2025.

© Copyright of Globes Publisher Itonut (1983) Ltd., 2025.

Amit Krig  credit: Shlomi Yosef
Amit Krig credit: Shlomi Yosef
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