Nvidia to build Israel’s most powerful AI computer
Nvidia Corp. is building Israel’s most powerful artificial-intelligence supercomputer to meet soaring customer demand for AI applications, it said Monday.
Nvidia, the world’s most valuable listed chip company, said the cloud-based system would cost hundreds of millions of dollars and be partly operational by the end of 2023.
Nvidia had worked with 800 start-ups in Israel and tens of thousands of software engineers, Nvidia senior vice president Gilad Shainer said.
The system, called Israel-1, is expected to deliver performance of up to eight exaflops of AI computing to make it one of the world’s fastest AI supercomputers. One exaflop has the ability to perform one quintillion – or 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 – calculations per second.
AI was the “most important technology in our lifetime,” Shainer said, adding that to develop AI and generative AI applications, large graphics processing units (GPUs) were needed.
“Generative AI is going everywhere nowadays,” he told Reuters. “You need to be able to run training on large datasets.”
Companies in Israel would have access to a supercomputer they do not have today, he added.
“This system is a large-scale system that actually will enable them to do training much quicker, to build frameworks and build solutions that can tackle more complex problems,” Shainer said.
OpenAI’s ChatGPT, for example, was created with thousands of Nvidia GPUs. The system was developed by the former Mellanox team. Nvidia bought Israeli chip designer Mellanox Technologies in 2019 for nearly $7 billion, outbidding Intel Corp.
Nvidia’s first priority for the supercomputer was its Israeli partners, Shainer said.
“We may use this system to work with partners outside of Israel down the road,” he said.
Last week, Nvidia said it had worked with Britain’s University of Bristol to build a new supercomputer using a new Nvidia chip that would compete with Intel and Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (Reuters)