US semiconductor giant Nvidia announced this week that it will set off on an expansion of its Israel operations, including the recruitment of 600 new software and hardware engineers for a variety of positions.
The development comes a year after Nvidia completed the USD 7 billion acquisition of Israel’s Mellanox Technologies, a leading supplier of communications infrastructure for data servers and storage systems.
Mellanox’s solutions include adapters, switches, software, and silicon that accelerate application runtime and maximize business results for a wide range of markets, including high-performance computing, enterprise data centers, Web 2.0, cloud, storage, and financial services. Many of the world’s top cloud service providers use Mellanox interconnects as well as Nvidia GPUs.
Nvidia invented the graphics processing unit (GPU) in 1999, redefining modern computer graphics and sparking the growth of the PC gaming market.
In recent years, Nvidia has become a leader in artificial intelligence computing with an eye on gaming, autonomous vehicles and robotics, data centers, and professional visualization. Last year, Nvidia unveiled its A100 AI chip, which founder and CEO Jensen Huang called the “ultimate instrument for advancing AI.”
“The expanding use of AI and data science is reshaping computing and data center architectures,” said Huang at the time of the Mellanox acquisition. “With Mellanox, the new Nvidia has end-to-end technologies from AI computing to networking, full-stack offerings from processors to software, and significant scale to advance next-generation data centers.”
“Our combined expertise, supported by a rich ecosystem of partners, will meet the challenge of surging global demand for consumer internet services, and the application of AI and accelerated data science from cloud to edge to robotics,” he added.
Together with Mellanox, Nvidia currently employs 2,400 people in Israel across seven development centers in Yokneam, Tel Aviv, Ra’anana, Jerusalem, Beersheba, Kiryat Gat, and Tel Hai. Nvidia’s development operations in Israel are the largest outside the United States.
The 600 new roles will include electrical engineers, software engineers, computer science engineers, chip designers, architects (hardware and software), and quality control across a number of levels, from student to senior.
Gideon Rosenberg, Nvidia Israel’s head of human resources, said Nvidia is expanding all over the world and is proud to “deepen the company’s Israeli development center by opening hundreds of new jobs.”
Rosenberg noted that the company did not lay off or furlough any employees during the pandemic and continued to recruit hundreds of workers. He said the chip giant would be “happy to recruit talented workers who have lost their jobs due to the coronavirus crisis or who are looking for the next big challenge and want to work in one of the largest technology companies in the world with an ambitious vision and record of success, in a rewarding environment.”
In October 2020, Nvidia indicated that it would directly employ more than 100 Palestinian engineers from the West Bank who had been working as external contractors with Mellanox.
Mellanox co-founder Eyal Waldman, who has since left the company, hailed the move as a “historic moment and an unprecedented achievement” that would see the workers become salaried employees of Nvidia with benefits and perks. The workers, from Hebron, Rawabi, and Nablus, were previously employed by the Palestinian software and IT services outsourcing company ASAL Technologies and subcontracted to Mellanox.
This article first appeared in NoCamels, which covers innovations from Israel for a global audience.