Nvidia, the world’s leading chip company, is investing hundreds of millions into building Israel’s most powerful artificial intelligence (AI) supercomputer, called Israel-1. This is Nvidia’s response to a sudden growing demand in AI applications as announced by the company itself on Monday.
This Nvdia-powered supercomputer is expected to start operating partially by the end of 2023.
The system is expected to deliver an impressive performance of up to eight exaflops of AI computing power. For the sake of putting things into perspective, one exaflop has the ability to perform 1 quintillion – or 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 – calculations per second.
It will no doubt be one of the fastest AI supercomputers to exist in the world.
According to Gilad Shainer, a senior vice president at Nvidia, this supercomputer will be a great asset to Israel’s thriving AI industry. Nvidia already collaborates with 800 startups in Israel, involving tens of thousands of software engineers.
With Israel-1, Israeli companies will have access to a supercomputer resource that they don’t currently have. This powerful system is expected to speed up training and help create solutions for more complex problems.
Nvidia’s ChatGPT, which is known for its conversational abilities, was developed using Nvidia GPUs. This shows how powerful computing resources can enable large-scale projects.
The Israel-1 system was developed by the former Mellanox team, an Israeli chip designer that Nvidia acquired in 2019 for nearly $7 billion, surpassing Intel Corp.
While the focus of the new supercomputer is on Nvidia’s Israeli partners, the company is not ruling out expanding its reach.
Nvidia has also recently announced a partnership with the University of Bristol in Britain to work together in building a new supercomputer using a unique Nvidia chip. This move positions Nvidia as a competitor to chip giants like Intel and Advanced Micro Devices Inc.