Nvidia announced on Monday that it is constructing Israel’s most powerful artificial intelligence supercomputer in order to address rising customer demand for AI applications.
The cloud-based system, according to Nvidia, the world’s most valuable publicly traded semiconductor manufacturer, will cost hundreds of millions of dollars and will be mostly operational by the end of 2023.
Nvidia senior vice president Gilad Shainer stated that the company collaborated with 800 Israeli companies and tens of thousands of software engineers.
The machine, known as Israel-1, is intended to produce up to eight exaflops of AI computing speed, making it one of the world’s fastest AI supercomputers. One exaflop can do one quintillion – or one million,000,000,000,000 – calculations per second.
Shainer stated that AI was the “most important technology in our lifetime” and that big graphics processing units were required to develop AI and generative AI applications.
“Generative AI is everywhere nowadays. You need to be able to run training on large datasets,” he told Reuters, stressing that Israeli companies will have access to a supercomputer that they do not currently have.
“This 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.”
For example, OpenAI’s ChatGPT was built using thousands of Nvidia GPUs.