Nvidia to invest $1.5 billion in Israel’s largest-ever server farm
The Mevo Carmel site will host Blackwell processors and a next-generation supercomputer.
Technology giant Nvidia is expected to announce in the coming days the establishment of the largest server farm in Israel. Calcalist has learned that the company is in advanced talks with the real estate firm Mega Or DC, controlled by Tzachi Nachmias, to lease a data center currently under construction in the Mevo Carmel industrial zone near Yokneam. The new facility will be located next to another Nvidia server farm built in cooperation with Shoval Paz and will also house the company’s new Blackwell processors.
The cost of building the server farm’s infrastructure, including the basic structure, electromechanical systems, electrical panels, transformers, and cooling systems, is estimated at NIS 1.5 billion (approximately $465 million) and will be borne jointly by the parties. Nvidia is expected to invest separately in the computing equipment, bringing the total investment to approximately NIS 4.84 billion ($1.5 billion).
The facility will span about 30,000 square meters and consume roughly 64 megawatts of electricity, placing it among the most energy-intensive server farms in Israel. Its power consumption will be double that of the nearby Nvidia server farm and Shonfeld Engineering’s SDS facility in Modi’in, each of which consumes about 30 megawatts. By comparison, Amazon’s three data centers in Israel each consume around 12 megawatts.
Nvidia plans to install a new and more advanced supercomputer at the site, exceeding the capabilities of Israel-1, the supercomputer developed by the company in Yokneam, which ranked 34th among the world’s top 500 supercomputers. The new system is expected, among other uses, to support testing of Nvidia’s next-generation chips before they are released to market.
Like the adjacent facility, the new data center will house Blackwell processors, GPUs that deliver four times the computing power of those used in Israel-1 for training workloads and up to 30 times the performance for inference tasks. In addition to server hosting and cooling, the site will include development laboratories and offices. It will be dedicated exclusively to Nvidia’s internal development needs and will not serve external customers.
Construction is expected to be completed within approximately a year and a half after the signing of the agreement, which is anticipated in the coming days.
The Mevo Carmel industrial zone is located within the Megiddo Regional Council, with development rights shared among several local authorities. Mega Or’s data center is being built on the western side of the park, which spans roughly 550 dunams. The project is being carried out through Mega Or’s subsidiary, Mega D.C., which manages the group’s data center activities.
The new facility is expected to become Nvidia’s largest laboratory center outside the United States, while the data center itself will rank among the largest in the Middle East. By comparison, Nvidia’s existing supercomputer in Israel operates from a 30-megawatt facility that was built at a cost of about $500 million.
The new center will be dedicated to supercomputing and will incorporate Nvidia’s most advanced technologies, including Blackwell-based systems and integrated Grace Blackwell platforms. It will also support testing of new GPU chips under development. The technological infrastructure is expected to include Nvidia-developed communications platforms such as Spectrum-X800, Quantum-X800, and BlueField-3 SuperNIC, enabling large-scale supercomputing systems for training large language models, advanced scientific research, and massive AI workloads.
To support the facility’s substantial energy needs, the Israel Electric Corporation is preparing to supply power to both Nvidia server farms via the nearby Hagit power plant, which has a generation capacity of 840 megawatts. The high electricity demand underscores the need for advanced cooling solutions. As a result, the new center will deploy specialized liquid-cooling technologies, expected to be brought to Israel specifically for this project, enabling efficient thermal management while significantly reducing energy consumption compared to traditional air-cooling systems.
In parallel, Nvidia is in the final stages of signing an agreement to establish a large research and development campus in Kiryat Tivon. The planned campus will cover approximately 90 dunams and is expected to house around 8,000 employees. The estimated real estate investment is NIS 90-100 million, in addition to development costs. Together, the Kiryat Tivon campus and the Mevo Carmel facilities are set to turn northern Israel into a major technology hub, supporting thousands of engineers, researchers, and technicians and strengthening ties between Nvidia and regional academic institutions.
Nvidia is currently the world’s most valuable publicly traded company, with a market capitalization of $4.3 trillion, after its shares rose 27% since the beginning of the year, though still below the $5 trillion peak reached earlier this year. Mega Or is traded on the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange at a valuation of NIS 7.8 billion, following an 89% rise in its share price this year. The company primarily focuses on the construction and operation of logistics centers and is among the largest shareholders in DSC.
Nvidia and Mega Or declined to comment.
