Nvidia has completed the first phase of its Israel-1 AI supercomputer.

Israel-1 is now available for use by the company's research and development teams and "selected partners," and is housed in Nvidia's Israel data center.

The Israel-1 supercomputer will eventually offer eight exaflops of peak AI performance, and 130 petaflops of high performance computing (HPC).

The system will, once completed, will feature 256 Nvidia HGX H100 systems, combining 2,048 Nvidia H100 80GB GPUs with more than 34 million CUDA cores and 1 million fourth-generation Tensor Cores, 2,560 BlueField-3 DPUs, and 80 Spectrum-4 switches.

The first phase includes Dell PowerEdge XE9680 servers based on 128 Nvidia HGX H100 systems, 1,280 BlueField-3 DPUs, and more than 40 Spectrum-4 switches. Completed in under 20 weeks and two months before expected, it offers half the computing power of the full system (four exaflops for AI and 65 petaflops for standard HPC.)

The second stage of the computer will be completed in the first half of 2024.

“Israel is home to world-leading AI researchers and developers creating applications for the next wave of AI,” said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of Nvidia. “With Nvidia’s Israel-1 AI supercomputer, a broad range of innovative companies in Israel will create AI that can transform the productivity and business models of enterprises around the world.”

Israel-1 will be used as a testbed for Nvidia's Spectrum-X, a networking platform the company is developing in Israel that is hoped to improve the performance and efficiency of Ethernet-based AI clouds. Dell Technologies, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, and Lenovo will be the first to integrate Spectrum-X technologies.

Plans for the supercomputer were first shared in May 2023, and the first phase was expected by the end of the year. The cloud-based system cost "hundreds of millions of dollars."

At the same time, Nvidia announced it was developing a supercomputer in Taiwan, known as Taipei-1, which will feature 64 DGX H100 AI systems and 64 OVX systems.