Nvidia doubles down on Israel with multi-billion dollar mega campus
Move sets stage for Nvidia to surpass Intel as Israel’s largest private employer, with thousands more hires planned.
Nvidia is not content with being the world’s largest company by market value, having reached a valuation of $3.9 trillion, but is now also striving to break records with its presence in Israel. The chip giant is searching for land to purchase in the north of the country to build a massive campus, with an investment expected to reach billions of dollars for the land and construction.
Nvidia has published a request for information to locate an area of 70 to 120 dunams, with continuous building rights for 80,000 to 180,000 square meters. According to the company’s requirements, the site should be close to its current headquarters in Yokneam. Nvidia is open to offers from kibbutzim and moshavim that can provide land of the appropriate size. The search area stretches from Zichron Yaakov in the south to the Krayot region in the north. Real estate consulting firm Colliers is supporting Nvidia in the search.
Nvidia has allocated only two weeks for this process, underscoring the urgency with which it wants to advance the plan. If it goes ahead, within five to six years Nvidia could operate the largest high-tech campus in Israel. In scale, the new campus will resemble an entire technology park rather than the headquarters of a single company. For comparison, Haifa’s Matam Park spans 220 dunams with 25 buildings covering 272,000 square meters. A project of this size will have wide-ranging economic implications, from Nvidia’s level of commitment to Israel to the broader employment ecosystem needed to support it.
In recent years, Nvidia has become the fastest-growing multinational tech employer in Israel. Over the past two years alone, it has hired 1,000 new employees annually, bringing its Israeli workforce to 5,000. It still has around 100 open positions, and by the time the new campus is built, it is expected to surpass Intel as Israel’s largest private-sector employer. Many of Nvidia’s new hires come from Intel, which is grappling with a crisis and has cut its local headcount by more than 10% over the past year, to around 9,000. Other global giants have also made cuts: Microsoft has conducted several rounds of layoffs affecting its 3,000-person Israeli center, while Google and Amazon have also downsized in the past year.
Nvidia’s Israeli staff are currently split between two main centers: its Yokneam headquarters, which it “inherited” through its acquisition of Eyal Waldman’s Mellanox, and the Rubinstein Twin Towers in Tel Aviv. In Tel Aviv, Nvidia already occupies eight floors and, as Calcalist recently revealed, it has leased an additional ten floors, giving it nearly half the tower’s space. Nvidia’s expansion in Israel does not stop there: it is also building one of the country’s largest server farms, covering 10,000 square meters in Ramot Menashe in the north, with a $500 million investment.
Sources close to Nvidia emphasize that the planned new campus will not replace its existing sites but will add to them, maintaining the company’s current real estate footprint. The decision to expand through land purchases, rather than rely only on leased space, was made during Israel’s ongoing Swords of Iron War, with Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang directly involved in the decision. The move reflects Nvidia’s broader strategy of owning critical real estate, similar to its purchase of buildings in Santa Clara, California.
Nvidia is not only the world’s most valuable company but also the dominant force in AI chips and one of the biggest stories in tech growth history. When it acquired Mellanox just six years ago, Nvidia was valued at “only” $93 billion and was mostly known to gamers for its graphics cards. With the rise of artificial intelligence, Nvidia realized it had exactly the processing power the new era required, and its stock has soared ever since, all the way to nearly $4 trillion as of last Friday. This valuation marks a historic record for both Nvidia and Wall Street.
Nvidia’s Israeli operations began in earnest with its 2019 acquisition of Mellanox, which was completed at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. At that time, Mellanox had just 2,000 employees. In 2023, Nvidia launched Israel-1, one of the world’s most powerful AI supercomputers, to help drive the local startup ecosystem. The system went live almost immediately after the October 7 attacks, despite Israel’s challenging circumstances. At the end of 2024, again amid the war, Nvidia acquired two Israeli startups, Deci and Run.AI, for a combined $1 billion.
Over the past five years, Nvidia’s Israeli development center has become one of the company’s main global hubs. While Nvidia employs around 36,000 people worldwide, far fewer than other tech giants, nearly 15% of that workforce is based in Israel. More importantly, development of three of Nvidia’s four main product lines, including CPUs and networking chips, is led or largely done in Israel, mainly from Yokneam. Five Israeli executives now report directly to Huang, including Amit Krig, who oversees development in Israel, and Michael Kagan, who co-founded Mellanox and now serves as Nvidia’s CTO.
