Nebius to build Israel's national supercomputer

The project has an overall budget of NIS 500 million including a government grant of NIS 160 million from the Israel Innovation Authority.

Nebius Group (Nasdaq: NBIS), the cloud security company of former Yandex senior executives including the founder Arkady Volozh, has been chosen by the Israel Innovation Authority to build Israel's supercomputer. The project has an overall budget of NIS 500 million including a government grant of NIS 160 million from the Innovation Authority.

According to the announcement of the Innovation Authority, the supercomputer will have four times the processing power required in the tender, with 16,000 petaflops, the unit of measurement for supercomputer performance. Nebius also pledged to offer discounted computing power, double the amount required, by early 2026. The number of graphics processors to be placed in the data center was not disclosed, but the company committed to "thousands of processors with a budget of hundreds of millions of shekels."

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In recent months, Nebius has been marked by analysts as a stock with growth potential, and a rival to AI server company CoreWeave. Nebius is managed by an Israeli team of former Yandex executives and operates partly from Israel. The company was founded by Volozh, the founder of the "Russian Google" Yandex, who took a bold stance against Putin on the war in Ukraine and has lived in Israel since the invasion of Crimea in 2014.

After being effectively forced to sell his holdings in the Yandex search engine and taxi and delivery service in Russia to Kremlin associates, Volozh, together with former Yandex CEO Elena Bunina, who immigrated to Israel, founded Nebius, now a company that builds data centers and rents space in existing data centers and rents them to tech companies.

To distance himself from the Putin regime, Volozh built Nebius from scratch as a Dutch-Israeli company, headquartered in the Netherlands and traded on the Nasdaq, using the stock exchange shell in which the Russian company was previously traded, until trading in it ceased days after Russia's invasion of Ukraine. At first, this did not help him: in Italy, the government refused to allow Nebius to operate due to concerns about links with Russia. However, over the past year, due in part to the global appetite for AI and the increasing purchase of processing servers for the field, the company has been revived.

It is believed Nebius and Volozh's close relationship with the top executives at Nvidia has allowed the company to receive priority in the line for advanced AI processors. In this tender, Nebius is offering the Innovation Authority 4,000 current-generation "Blackwell" graphics processors (B200). The Israel supercomputer will serve national infrastructures such as academic institutions and government authorities.

Published by Globes, Israel business news - en.globes.co.il - on May 14, 2025.

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