Nvidia Builds Israel's Strongest AI Supercomputer With Performance Up To Eight Exaflops

JAKARTA - Nvidia Corp announced on Monday, May 29 that it is building Israel's strongest artificial intelligence (AI) supercomputer. This is to meet the rapidly increasing demand for customers to AI applications.

Nvidia, the world's top-listed chip company, said the cloud-based system would spend hundreds of millions of dollars and part of it would be operational by the end of 2023.

Gilad Shainer, senior vice president at Nvidia, said Nvidia worked with 800 startups in Israel and tens of thousands of software engineers.

The system, called Israel-1, is expected to perform up to eight AI computing exaflops, making it one of the fastest AI supercomputers in the world. One exaflop has the ability to perform 1 quintilin - or 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 - calculations per second.

Shainer says AI is "the most important technology in our lives" and to develop AI and AI-generative applications, a large graphics processing unit (GPU) is needed.

"General AI is now everywhere. You need to be able to carry out training on a large dataset," Shainer told Reuters. He noted that companies in Israel will have access to supercomputers they don't currently have.

"Ideally, this system is a large-scale system that will actually allow them to do training more quickly, build a framework, and build solutions that can handle more complex problems," he said.

This system was developed by the former Mellanox team. Nvidia bought an Israeli chip designer company, Mellanox Technologies, in 2019 for nearly $7 billion, beating Intel Corp's offer.

Shainer said Nvidia's first priority for this supercomputer was their partner in Israel. "Maybe we will use this system to work with partners outside Israel in the future," he said.

Last week, Nvidia announced that it was working with the University of Bristol in the United Kingdom to build a new supercomputer using the new Nvidia chip, which will compete with Intel and Advanced Micro Devices Inc.