Nvidia embarks on huge investment in Israel

Nvidia has published a request for information (RFI) to find a plot of land between 70 and 120 dunams in area (17.5-30 acres) for the construction of a research and development campus of between 80,000 and 180,000 square meters, with immediate contiguous building rights, located between Zichron Yaakov in the south west, Migdal Ha’emek in the east, Kiryat Ata in the north, and Haifa in the west. Nvidia currently has a total of over 100,000 square meters of office space in Israel, in Yokne’am, Tel Aviv, Beersheva, and Tel Hai.

Publication of the RFI indicates Nvidia’s intention of entering into one the largest real estate deals ever by a foreign technology company. It I estimated that it plans to spend up to NIS 500 million on buying the land, and a further NIS 1.5 billion on the construction of the new campus, which will house several thousand new employees of a company that already employs about 5,000 people in Israel.

The planed built space is so large that it bears no comparison to almost any commercial or office building constructed in Israel in recent years. Azrieli Group’s Spiral Tower currently under construction in Tel Aviv at an investment of NIS 500 million in high-demand land and a further NIS 2 billion in construction, will contain a total of 150,000 square meters of space, which is less than Nvidia intends to build in the north. The total floor pace of one of Azrieli’s existing three towers in Tel Aviv is 45,000 square meters. Nvidia intends to build in the north of Israel, where land is much cheaper. Agricultural land rezoned for commerce and industry in the Jezreel Valley area or the Lower Galilee will cost some NIS 300 million, and up to NIS 500 million if Nvidia decides to locate its campus in a high-demand area, such as Haifa.

According to the RFI published this morning, it would appear that Nvidia seeks to build an additional campus not far from its campus in Yokne’am, which is based on Mellanox, which Nvidia acquired in 2020, and which is the employer of most of Nvidia’s workers in Israel. At the same time, Nvidia is looking for a site “with high transport accessibility, close to main routes and public transport.” It can therefore be assumed that it will want to locate the campus close to Road 6 or to a station on the railway line that connects Tel Aviv to Nahariya via Haifa, or on the Jezreel Valley railway.

In order to obtain such a large contiguous area of land, Nvidia will probably not be able to negotiate with a single seller. It will encourage separate entities such as a group of kibbutzim or moshavim to combine to offer land and have it rezoned for industry.

Nvidia continues to see Israel as one of its strategic sites, and it is expanding all its activity in the country. Last month, it announced that it was doubling the area it rents in one of the twin Rubinstein towers in Yitzhak Sadeh Street in Tel Aviv to 22,000 square meters, more than half the floor space in the building. It will provide space for 1,200 employees, and enable the company to expand its software activity in Israel and to attract high-quality workers from the center of the country. This morning’s RFI indicates that Nvidia still sees the north of Israel as its most important focus of activity, and seeks to expand there.

The activity in the north based on the acquisition of Yokne’am-based Mellanox for $6.9 billion has tuned out to be highly profitable for Nvidia, and one of the best technology acquisitions of all time in terms of the ratio of price to return. In the year before the acquisition, Mellanox had annual revenue of $1.3 billion. By April 2025, its activity had grown five-fold, and its workforce had doubled. In the last quarter, Nvidia’s communications activity based on Mellanox generated revenue of $5 billion, and it is the company’s second most important division, after the computing division, which includes the server and AI products.

No comment was forthcoming from Nvidia.

Published by Globes, Israel business news – en.globes.co.il – on July 6, 2025.

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