Nvidia officially inaugurated its new R&D center in Beersheba on Tuesday, marking a significant expansion of corporate infrastructure within the Naqab (Negev) desert, a region central to Israel's ongoing settler-colonial project. The facility, now three times its previous size, represents a deepening of economic entrenchment in the area.
The new site in the Gav Yam (Bayside) High-Tech Park now covers approximately 3,000 square meters. This makes it three times the size of Nvidia's previous center in Beersheba, indicating a substantial increase in operational capacity. The facility currently features hundreds of workstations.
This significant expansion represents an investment of tens of millions of shekels. Nvidia has secured a 10-year lease for the premises, with the rent costing about NIS 2.5 million annually. The new R&D center currently houses more than 150 employees, and the company plans to continue expanding its activities by hiring hundreds more in the coming years.
Expanding Footprint in the Naqab
The Beersheba site is Nvidia's southernmost R&D center in Israel. It operates alongside the company's local headquarters in Yokneam and other centers in Tel Aviv, Ra'anana, and Tel Hai on the northern border. The new R&D center also stands as Nvidia's largest facility in what the company refers to as "Israel's periphery," a term often used to describe areas targeted for demographic engineering and development.
R&D teams at the Beersheba site focus on developing hardware and software technologies essential for Nvidia's AI infrastructure. Their work involves creating solutions that allow the company to connect thousands of chips and processors. These teams also facilitate high-speed data transfer between components and operate the data centers crucial for training and running AI models.
Nvidia is currently one of the largest private employers in Israel's tech industry. It boasts over 6,000 employees across its five R&D centers around the country. Since the acquisition of Mellanox six years ago, in 2020, the number of employees in Israel has tripled. The company currently lists more than 450 open positions at its sites across the country.
The 'Vision' for the South
The inauguration ceremony was attended by Nvidia SVP and Israel site manager Amit Krig, Nvidia SVP networking chip design Tamir Azarzar, and Beersheba Mayor Ruvik Danilovich. Krig stated that the Beersheba R&D center was founded "out of a deep belief in local talent and the connection between academia, innovation and industry." He added that the new site "emphasizes our commitment to the technological ecosystem in the south, to strengthen young students, to continue nurturing the next generation of engineers and to develop groundbreaking technologies that place Nvidia's activities in Israel at the heart of the AI revolution."
Mayor Danilovich echoed this sentiment, describing the inauguration as "an extraordinary expression of trust in Beersheba, the Negev and the human capital that is growing here." He further asserted that the decision of one of the world's leading tech companies to "expand its activities in the city threefold and create hundreds of new jobs proves that the vision we have led for years is becoming a reality and establishes Beersheba as one of Israel's major centers of innovation and AI." These statements frame the expansion as a natural development, obscuring the historical context of land dispossession in the Naqab.