Nvidia is constructing a 30-megawatt research-and-development supercomputer stuffed with its latest-generation Blackwell GPUs in northern Israel at an estimated cost of half a billion dollars. The cluster’s home will be a 10,000-square metre facility located in the Mevo Carmel Science and Industry Park, near the city of Yokne’am Illit. According to Nvidia it will pack hundreds of Nv liquid-cooled Blackwell systems, BlueField-3 SuperNICs, Spectrum-X800s, and Quantum X800 switches.
According to our understanding, the big beast will help Nvidia employees develop next-generation datacenter technologies.
It’s not clear how many accelerators will be deployed. Nvidia already has several liquid-cooled Blackwell systems that have varying numbers of accelerations. However, Israeli media reports that the full configuration of “several thousand” graphics cards will rival the nation’s Israel-1 Supercomputer. This system is composed of 2,048 H100 Accelerators, which are connected using Nvidia’s Ethernet Spectrum-X family switches and superNICs. It can provide peak FP64 performances of 69 (vector), 137 (matrix), or 8 exaFLOPS (sparse FP8) for AI applications.
Blackwell promises to deliver up to 2.5x more floating-point performance than Hopper, at least for most precisions. This can increase to up to 5x if the precision is reduced to 4 bits. Blackwell promises a higher memory bandwidth and a higher computational performance. Even with the same number of accelerators, the new facility will still be able to produce a more powerful system.
According to reports, system building began last year. It is expected that operations will begin in the first half 2025. What about the new rules for export?
Nvidia’s progress and the number of GPUs it plans on deploying could make the chipmaker vulnerable to the latest round of export controls by the Biden administration.
Nvidia’s partners, as we saw with xAI Colossus AI Supercomputer, have shown that they are more than capable of deploying massive systems in a matter months.
According to the rules revealed on Monday, Israel will be labelled a Tier-two nation and subject to import limits equivalent to 50,000 advanced GPUs for a two-year span between 2025-2027.
We understand that these rules will not go into effect until 120 days after publication and may not survive the Trump presidency. If the administration of the president-elect moves forward with these plans then the implementation period may give Nvidia the time it needs to complete the cluster.
It’s also possible the super may slip under the export caps or be excluded from the rules as it’s believed the computer will be used exclusively for internal research-and-development purposes. According to the rules, chip orders that have a combined computational power of around 1,700 advanced graphics processors will not require a license from Uncle Sam. They will also not count against any nation’s chip cap.
Entities in Tier-one nations who meet US security standards are allowed to place up seven percent of their global computing in other countries around the world. Biden opens federal land for power-hungry AI Datacenters
Despite this, Israeli tech companies are concerned that the rules will prevent them from competing in the AI field. (r)
