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US chipmaker Nvidia on Sunday announced plans to triple the size of its research and development presence in Beersheba, a city in the country’s south, and hire hundreds of additional Israeli staff.

The chip giant will move its current Beersheba R&D center to a newly built, nearby site, three times the size of its existing 1,000-square-meter facility. The new site, located at Beersheba’s Gav Yam high-tech park, covers about 3,000 sqm and is expected to be fully operational by the end of the first half of 2026.

As part of the expansion, Nvidia is seeking to hire hundreds of additional employees in the southern region, including chip developers, hardware and software engineers, architects, students, and university graduates.

Nvidia senior vice president Amit Krig said that the firm’s expansion in Beersheba reflects the chipmaker’s commitment to hunting for the “best engineers — wherever they are.”

“The new site will serve as a professional home for hundreds of additional developers from Beersheba and the surrounding area, who will be part of creating groundbreaking hardware and software technologies and advancing global innovation in artificial intelligence,” said Krig, who heads Nvidia’s R&D operations in Israel.

Nvidia’s R&D activities in Israel are already the firm’s largest outside of the US. The computing giant, valued at more than $4.5 trillion on Wall Street, is one of the country’s largest employers with over 5,000 workers in Israel in seven R&D centers, from Yokne’am in the north through Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, and Ra’anana in the center of the country to Beersheba in the south.

Many of Nvidia’s high-end processors and networking chips, essential for training the largest AI models, are developed at its R&D centers in Israel. As global tech firms including Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet, and Tesla race to build AI data centers and dominate the emerging technology, demand for Nvidia’s most advanced processors is surging.

“The establishment of Nvidia’s new site tripling its operations in the city is important news for Beersheba and the Negev,” said Beersheba Mayor Ruvik Danilovich. “The decision expresses confidence in Beersheba’s ecosystem, and will create hundreds of new jobs that will strengthen the city’s human capital and cement its position as a leading innovation center.”

In recent years, Beersheba’s Gav Yam high-tech center, adjacent to Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, has grown into a thriving hub of R&D facilities for leading tech companies, including Microsoft, Dell, Wix, and defense contractors Rafael Advanced Defense Systems and Elbit Systems.

Nvidia’s expansion in the south comes after the chipmaker announced a plan in July to build a massive multibillion-dollar tech campus in Israel’s north, which is expected to provide thousands of jobs. The computing juggernaut is seeking a plot of land spanning 70 to 120 dunams (30 acres) with construction rights to build a campus of 80,000–180,000 sqm in the area of Zichron Yaakov, Haifa, or the Jezreel Valley.

Alongside its R&D operations, Nvidia has made a number of mega acquisitions deals in Israel over the past decade. In December 2024, the chipmaker completed the purchase of Israeli AI workload management startup Run:ai for an estimated $700 million. It marked Nvidia’s largest acquisition in the country since buying Israel’s Mellanox Technologies Ltd., a maker of high-speed servers and storage switching solutions used in supercomputers globally, for a massive $7 billion in 2020.

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