Israel to build new supercomputer for industry and academia

The Israel Innovation Authority has announced plans to launch a tender next month to establish a supercomputer dedicated to training domestic large language models (LLMs). Announced at an event at Tel Aviv University, CEO Dror Bin explained this move was to ensure the country remains a global leader in AI technologies. 

“When a high tech company or researcher wants to train a large model they have to buy time in the cloud (since), there is no local data centre with significant amount of GPUs (graphic processing units) that can train those models here,” he said.

Israel’s first supercomputer, built by Nvidia, completed its initial construction phase in November 2023, with the final phase slated for completion in 2024. However, it seems this new supercomputer will be more oriented towards industry and academia. “The supercomputer will be available for researchers and companies at lower than market cost,” Bin said. 

Bin also presented research where he noted that the government is budgeting approximately $250 million (or 1 billion shekels) on a national AI programme, 60% of which will be used in 2024 alone. He had called for more investments in the sector earlier this month. Intel then announced it was halting the construction of a multi-billion dollar chip factory in the country. However, the same study revealed that Israel ranks third globally in this sector, behind the UK and US. This is corroborated by research done by Accel, where it ranked 3rd by funding and 4th by quantity of GenAI startups, behind Germany.