Opinion
Israel’s next tech imperative: Building a national GPU network
"Leadership in AI will require the same mindset that built Israel’s early technology advances: seeing infrastructure not as expense but as strategy," writes Moshe Zilberstein, General Partner at N47.
The race for AI leadership is very important and very strategic both commercially and for national security. Many countries around the globe understand this, and invest heavily in infrastructure for AI, particularly high-performance computing and GPU clusters. For Israel, a country that often punches far above its weight in global innovation, the challenge is clear: we must reclaim our momentum in AI before the window closes.
A Post-War Opportunity
For two years, Israel’s leaders have been forced to focus on conflict resolution and geopolitical uncertainty, likely slowing down the development of national-level AI programming. Other countries have surged ahead with coordinated state-backed investments. The United States and China are committing tens of billions to advanced chips, data centers, and research programs. Across the Gulf, sovereign funds in Saudi Arabia and the UAE are pouring capital into massive AI campuses to guarantee local access to computing power.
Israel, by contrast, has relied almost entirely on private enterprise. While this ecosystem, fueled by global R&D centers and thousands of startups, remains world-class, it cannot by itself meet the computational demand required to train the next generation of AI models. GPUs have become the modern industrial resource, and access to them will define whether our economy remains a producer of innovation or a consumer of it.
The Infrastructure Deficit
Recent government efforts, such as the Israel Innovation Authority’s planned national supercomputer and a NIS 500 million server farm being built by Yossi Shonfeld’s SDS and VAST Data, an N47 portfolio company, are steps in the right direction. Yet, scale remains the issue. Israel’s planned systems will offer a fraction of the capacity available to peers in Europe, Asia, and the US. Experts estimate that to be competitive, Israel’s computing power would need to expand, a massive, ten- to twenty-fold
More fundamentally, there are significant concerns that the country’s national energy grid cannot yet support the loads that hyperscale data centers demand. A single AI facility can draw as much power as a mid-sized municipality. Without significant upgrades to energy and grid resilience, no volume of GPUs will deliver sustainable advantage.
Why GPU Farms Are Strategic Assets
In India, policymakers are debating whether GPU farms should be treated like national railways or power plants, critical infrastructure underpinning the next century of economic growth. The same logic applies to Israel. GPUs are not just servers; they are instruments of sovereignty. They power defense analytics, fintech, healthcare, and every layer of digital governance.
A country the size of Israel cannot rely on the private sector alone to build such capacity. GPU farms require enormous upfront investment, sustained access to affordable power, and policy certainty over data residency and regulation. No startup, or even a large enterprise, can shoulder that investment individually. This must be a national undertaking - one that combines public financing with private execution and open access for academia and industry.
Public-Private Collaboration: The Missing Ingredient
The government’s recent regulatory sandbox initiative is an encouraging precedent. It shows that ministries can create controlled frameworks for responsible experimentation. The same model can guide infrastructure investment: designate GPU hubs as national sandboxes for AI development, governed by clear ethical and security standards but accessible to approved partners across sectors.
Public-private collaboration also aligns with lessons from other regions. The World Economic Forum notes that national AI strategies succeed when governments align investment, infrastructure, and human capital under shared governance models. This is precisely what Israel now needs - a framework that invites corporate, academic, and sovereign stakeholders to co-invest in compute capacity that benefits the entire ecosystem.
From Startup Nation to Compute Nation
In many ways Israel is already a leader in AI, all the major GPU datacenters run on Nvidia chips backed by Mellanox’s networking and Vast’s storage, this is an amazing achievement, but it shouldn’t end there, the race for AI is on, and we need to leap ahead,
Leadership in AI will require the same mindset that built Israel’s early technology advances: seeing infrastructure not as expense but as strategy. The GPU farms, data centers, and energy upgrades we invest in today will determine whether Israeli AI startups of 2030 can train frontier models at home or must rent computing power abroad.
The post-war reconstruction period offers a rare moment to rethink national priorities. If Israel can mobilize government and industry around a shared vision for sovereign compute, we won’t just catch up in AI, we’ll redefine how a small nation competes in the age of intelligence.
Moshe Zilberstein is a General Partner at N47.
