Nvidia Corp announced on Monday that it will build Israel’s most powerful artificial intelligence (AI) supercomputer in a bid to meet the surging demand for its AI applications.
The supercomputer, called Israel-1, is expected to be one of the world’s fastest supercomputers, delivering a performance of up to eight exaflops of AI computing. One exaflop is capable of performing 1 quintillion (1,000,000,000,000,000,000) calculations per second.
Gilad Shainer, a senior vice president at Nvidia, explained that the company has worked with 800 startups in Israel. The supercomputer was designed by the former Mellanox team; the Israeli chip designing company that Nvidia acquired in 2019 for nearly $7 billion, outbidding Intel Corp.
“Generative AI is going everywhere nowadays. You need to be able to run training on large datasets,” Shainer told reporters. “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.”
Outside of the Israeli supercomputer, Nvidia revealed that it is working with Britain’s University of Bristol to build an advanced supercomputer to compete with competitors Intel and Advanced Micro Devices Inc.