By: Ariella Haviv- Jewish Voice Media

In a move that spotlights Israel’s growing centrality in the global artificial intelligence race, U.S. semiconductor giant Nvidia announced on Thursday that it will build a vast, multibillion-shekel research and development campus in Kiryat Tivon, a northern town near Haifa. The decision is being hailed as one of the most consequential foreign investments in Israel’s high-tech sector in recent years—both for its sheer scale and for its geographic significance beyond the country’s traditional tech strongholds.

According to a report that appeared on Thursday in The Times of Israel, the planned campus will span some 160,000 square meters and is expected to employ 10,000 people, effectively doubling Nvidia’s current workforce in Israel. Construction is slated to begin in 2027, with completion targeted for 2031, marking a long-term commitment to Israel’s technological ecosystem at a moment when global competition in artificial intelligence, advanced computing, and data infrastructure has reached unprecedented intensity.

The new facility will be Nvidia’s eighth R&D center in Israel, reinforcing the country’s status as the company’s largest research and development hub outside the United States. As The Times of Israel report noted, Nvidia’s Israeli operations are not peripheral; they sit at the very heart of the company’s most advanced chip and networking technologies, many of which underpin the AI revolution reshaping industries worldwide.

“Our new campus will be a place where our teams can collaborate, invent, and build the future of AI,” Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang said in a statement quoted by The Times of Israel. He went further, framing the investment not merely as a business decision but as a reflection of deep institutional ties.

“Israel is home to some of the world’s most brilliant technologists and has become Nvidia’s second home,” Huang said. “This investment reflects our deep and enduring commitment to our families in Israel and their unique contributions to the AI era.”

That language resonates strongly in Israel’s tech community, which has long prided itself on innovation, engineering rigor, and a culture of problem-solving forged in both academic and military settings. Nvidia’s Israeli teams are instrumental in developing many of the company’s high-end processors and networking chips—components that are indispensable for training the world’s largest and most sophisticated AI models.

The Kiryat Tivon campus will not be a conventional office park. According to details provided by Nvidia and reported by The Times of Israel, the site will be designed along the lines of the company’s iconic, spaceship-like headquarters in Santa Clara, California. Beyond offices and laboratories, the campus will feature collaborative spaces, innovation labs, a visitor center, cafés, and a public park, reflecting Nvidia’s emphasis on interdisciplinary interaction and quality of life.

The company said the campus is intended to “foster innovation within Nvidia and with partners, startups, and the broader ecosystem,” supporting its long-term growth in Israel. For observers cited by The Times of Israel, this phrasing signals Nvidia’s intention to serve not just as an employer but as an anchor institution around which a broader northern tech hub could emerge.

The campus will be built on a 90-dunam (22-acre) plot purchased by Nvidia for approximately NIS 90 million ($29 million), according to the Israel Land Authority. The chipmaker reportedly received a NIS 70 million discount on the land purchase—an incentive that has drawn attention but has also been carefully contextualized by Israeli officials.

Beyond the land discount, Nvidia did not request—and was not granted—additional tax breaks or financial benefits, the Finance Ministry confirmed. This point has been emphasized in The Times of Israel’s coverage, particularly amid public debates over how aggressively Israel should court multinational corporations and at what cost.

Nvidia itself has declined to specify the total cost of the project, describing it only as a “long-term, multibillion-shekel investment.” Analysts cited in The Times of Israel report suggest that the figure could ultimately run into several billions of shekels once construction, infrastructure, and staffing are fully accounted for.

Nvidia currently employs over 5,000 workers in Israel, spread across seven R&D centers from Yokne’am, near Kiryat Tivon, to Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, Ra’anana, and Beersheba in the south. Nvidia’s Israeli operations are not siloed; rather, they are deeply integrated into the company’s global engineering pipeline.

Many of Nvidia’s most advanced technologies—particularly in networking and data-center acceleration—have roots in Israel, especially following the company’s acquisition of Mellanox Technologies in 2020. That $7 billion deal, one of the largest tech acquisitions in Israeli history, transformed Nvidia’s footprint in the country and cemented Israel’s role as a linchpin of its AI strategy.

As global technology giants such as Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet, and Tesla race to build massive AI data centers, demand for Nvidia’s cutting-edge chips has surged. This demand has been a major driver of Nvidia’s meteoric rise in market value, culminating in its becoming the world’s first $5 trillion company at the end of October.

The decision to locate the new campus in Kiryat Tivon, rather than in the Tel Aviv metropolitan area, is being closely scrutinized. Israel’s high-tech sector remains heavily concentrated in the center of the country, where soaring housing prices, congestion, and infrastructure strain have become chronic challenges.

As The Times of Israel reported, Israeli policymakers view Nvidia’s move as a potential catalyst for decentralizing high-tech employment, bringing high-paying jobs and investment to regions outside the crowded Tel Aviv corridor.

“If a company of this magnitude, which builds the most sophisticated technologies in AI, decides to take such a strategic step, it is going to position Israel at the core of AI solutions,” said Shlomi Kofman, vice president of global partnerships at the Israel Innovation Authority, in comments to The Times of Israel.

“Having such an R&D center will have a huge and long-term impact on the economy and education in the northern part of the country, as well as contribute to the economy as a whole,” he added.

Kofman, who previously served as Israel’s Consul General in San Francisco, emphasized that the campus would likely generate a powerful clustering effect. “Naturally, it is going to create a whole concentration of knowledge, experience, and talent and attract more investment than just the startups that will be created around it,” he said, as quoted in The Times of Israel report.

Kiryat Tivon is an upper-middle-class community of fewer than 20,000 residents, located about 30 minutes from Haifa by car. While not traditionally known as a tech hub, it sits just north of Yokne’am Illit, where several technology firms—including Nvidia subsidiaries—already operate.

According to the information provided in The Times of Israel report, after Nvidia announced plans to expand its Israeli presence in July, the Israel Land Authority proposed multiple sites across the country. Kiryat Tivon ultimately emerged as the preferred location, offering a combination of available land, proximity to existing tech clusters, and a high quality of life attractive to skilled workers.

“We are proud and pleased by Nvidia’s decision to build its new campus in Kiryat Tivon,” said Ido Greenblum, head of the Kiryat Tivon regional council, in a statement cited in The Times of Israel report. “We offered a winning location, combining a green environment, high quality of life, a strong education system, and excellent transportation access.”

Greenblum pledged that the local government would work to transform Nvidia’s presence into broader regional opportunities. The council is already planning infrastructure projects, including small businesses, hotels, and restaurants, designed to serve the campus, local residents, and the surrounding area.

The Kiryat Tivon announcement comes amid a broader expansion of Nvidia’s footprint across Israel. At the end of October, Nvidia revealed plans to triple the size of its R&D presence in Beersheba, a city in the country’s south that has increasingly positioned itself as a cyber and technology hub.

As reported by The Times of Israel, the new Beersheba site, located in the Gav Yam tech park, will cover about 3,000 square meters and is expected to be fully operational by the first half of 2026. Nvidia plans to hire hundreds of additional Israeli staff for the site, further reinforcing its commitment to geographic diversification within Israel.

Alongside organic growth, Nvidia’s expansion in Israel has been driven by major acquisitions. In December 2024, the company completed the purchase of Run:ai, an Israeli AI workload management startup, for an estimated $700 million. The deal strengthened Nvidia’s software capabilities and deepened its integration into Israel’s startup ecosystem.

That acquisition followed Nvidia’s landmark purchase of Mellanox Technologies in 2020, which remains the company’s largest deal in Israel to date. Mellanox’s expertise in high-speed interconnects and data-center networking proved critical as Nvidia repositioned itself from a graphics-chip company into a full-stack AI powerhouse.

The cumulative effect of Nvidia’s investments is difficult to overstate. Beyond the thousands of direct jobs, economists cited in The Times of Israel report point to significant multiplier effects: demand for housing, education, transportation, and services; increased tax revenues; and the attraction of complementary industries.

There are also implications for Israel’s education system. Large-scale R&D centers often collaborate with universities and technical institutes, shaping curricula and research priorities. While Nvidia has not yet detailed its academic partnerships related to the Kiryat Tivon campus, such collaborations are a common feature of its global operations.

As artificial intelligence reshapes economies, militaries, and societies, Nvidia has emerged as one of the most influential companies in the world. Its decision to anchor a massive new campus in northern Israel is therefore not merely a corporate expansion, but a strategic alignment with a country that has positioned itself as a global innovation engine.

For Israel, the investment represents both validation and opportunity: validation of its technological prowess, and an opportunity to rebalance growth more evenly across regions. For Nvidia, it is a bet on talent, resilience, and a long-term partnership in a volatile world.

If the vision articulated by Jensen Huang and Israeli officials is realized, Kiryat Tivon may, within a decade, stand alongside Tel Aviv and Haifa as a recognized node in the global AI ecosystem—proof that in the race for technological leadership, geography still matters, and strategic commitment matters even more.