In a tender organized by the Israel Innovation Authority, the institution that manages national technological policies, technology giants Google and Amazon will compete in a NIS 240 million bid to build supercomputing infrastructure in Israel.
This is a project that seeks to boost the advancement of artificial intelligence (AI) in the country's technology industry and academia through the national AI program, which has a total budget of NIS 1.000 billion.
According to Aviv Zeevi, vice president of the Innovation Authority’s technology infrastructure division, the goal is for “Israeli companies to drive this great AI revolution by collecting relevant data, uploading it to the cloud and starting to train it to obtain information that will allow them to offer services and new products.”
Zeevi explains that the project will allow companies and universities to access a supercomputer with at least 2.000 graphical processing units (GPUs), specifically designed for AI tasks, and will be accessible in the cloud, with reduced rates for local researchers and companies.