CEO of Nvidia: “The consequences of AI infrastructure in Israel are very important”

“We are very proud to work with Israel in building supercomputers,” Li Huang answered with a smile. “And you know, the technology of a data center itself is a kind of miracle. It makes it possible to become a service provider, a regional cloud, and the company that does that will be worth a lot,” adds the founder of Nvidia.

“Think that on top of this “AI factory” (supercomputer – N.L.) the startups are built, all the research made possible thanks to it, the universities, and the students, and the research made possible thanks to it, the big companies that are going to use it to build AI create a downward economic flow. The economic effects of supercomputers are very profound,” he replies.

“It’s really all about intelligence, and the changes it generates, and it is necessary for every industry, every scientific field, every application, every company, for everyone. So the consequences of an artificial intelligence infrastructure in Israel are very important, and I am very happy that we are building the system,” says the CEO of Nvidia to Walla.

The two CEOs of the giant companies touch on a painful point in their words – Israel today does not have a proper infrastructure for the development of artificial intelligence, nor a significant data center that enables large-scale artificial intelligence applications (which is about to change with the establishment of the data center in the north). Despite the investments of Nvidia, Intel and others, Israel’s situation in the development of artificial intelligence is bad.

The Nagel Committee that investigated the issue and submitted its conclusions to the Prime Minister a few months ago reached grim conclusions: Israel does not have a national strategy in the field of artificial intelligence, there is a severe lack of artificial intelligence infrastructure (Huang, by the way, clearly refers to artificial intelligence as an infrastructure in itself, such as the Internet, electricity or sewage) and appropriate energy, a lack of supercomputers (a problem that Nvidia is trying to solve for us), and most seriously: there is a severe shortage of manpower in the field, and we Deteriorating in global innovation and development indices.

Israel has no computing infrastructure of its own, no suitable energy infrastructure for artificial intelligence data centers and no route planning for building electricity production facilities that will satisfy artificial intelligence’s appetite for electricity. Only 120 researchers work in the core fields of artificial intelligence in Israeli universities. For comparison – the University of Berkeley in California alone has 70 researchers in the field, and only 120 in Israel as a whole.

The Nagel Committee proposed to allocate 25 billion shekels (about seven billion US dollars then, about eight billion dollars today), in a budget that he mocked. The United States, for example, is investing 280 billion dollars through the new CHIPS law alone, China is investing hundreds of billions, and our neighbor Saudi Arabia will invest over 100 billion dollars in the next five years. The budget proposed by the Nagel Committee is simply not enough to catapult Israel forward in this field. Perhaps the State of Israel should And for those standing at its head, to listen to the advice that people like Pascal and Huang bring to her out of concern and sober vision.

The CEO of Dassault Systèmes Deleuze, which also has a local representative office here in Israel, added: “The field of AI (that is, building supercomputers) is a field that is difficult to research. But I guess you found a way to virtualize it. Artificial intelligence is a matter that can open up many things for you,” notes the CEO of Dassault Systèmes. “Wealth, I think even. I think you can take a lot of the benefits for the startups, but also in creating for markets other than Israel and the rest of the world,” Deleuze notes with optimism and an undisguised affection for Israel.

By the way, the two CEOs gathered together, in light of a broad and unusual collaboration announced between the two companies here yesterday (Tuesday), in which Nvidia and Dassault will invest in a joint venture of building what they call “physical artificial intelligence” – a modeling and physical simulation system with a joint contribution of knowledge from the two grant companies (which have been cooperating for over 25 years), for the “artificial intelligence economy” and the simulation of starting with the design of autonomous cars and electric vehicles from companies like Lucid, to the design of data centers for artificial intelligence based on Nvidia’s own server cabinets. In this sense, Huang pointed out, the two companies are both customers of each other (Dassault Systèmes runs its systems on Nvidia hardware, and Nvidia uses Dassault’s products for the design and design of processors, servers, etc.), as well as partners in the way – and the current artificial intelligence economy – and the future.

In the background of these things, it is important to mention another Israeli connection – last December Huang met at the NVIDIA headquarters in the United States with captivity survivors Avinathan Or and his partner Noa Argmani, about two months after his release from Hamas captivity. The meeting was organized by Amit Krieg, senior vice president and director of Nvidia’s development center in Israel, with the participation of the Israeli company’s management. During the conversation, Or and Argamani talked about the plans they had already made together, and Huang mentioned that the two were planning to go on a long trip around the world.