Nvidia CEO: Every Big Company Wants To Be In Israel Today

Every big company wants to have a presence in Israel, Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang said this week during a visit to the country.

“One of the things I’ve learned about Israeli companies is that everyone wants you,” he said at an event on Tuesday in Tel Aviv, making an allusion to the strong foreign investment and interest drawn by the local high-tech scene. “I don’t know of any big company that doesn’t want to be in Israel today.”

Huang’s visit came on the heels of his company’s announcement two weeks ago that it was acquiring Israel’s Mellanox Technologies, a leading supplier of end-to-end Ethernet and InfiniBand smart interconnect solutions for data servers and storage systems, for $6.9 billion.

Huang spent much of his two-day visit with Mellanox founder and CEO Eyal Waldman, “sprinting through Israel’s high-tech area and speaking with Mellanox’s 2,000 Israel-based employees and others,” according to a summary of the events published on an Nvidia blog.

“I can’t tell you how excited and proud I am that we’ll be a large company in Israel,” Huang said. With the acquisition, pending regulatory approvals, Israel will become the second-largest employee base for Nvidia, which has about 14,000 employees, nearly half of them in the US.

“The acquisition will unite two of the world’s leading companies in high-performance computing (HPC),” Nvidia said in a statement this month. “Together, NVIDIA’s computing platform and Mellanox’s interconnects power over 250 of the world’s TOP500 supercomputers and have as customers every major cloud service provider and computer maker.”

Huang said the company was “excited to unite Nvidia’s accelerated computing platform with Mellanox’s world-renowned accelerated networking platform under one roof to create next-generation datacenter-scale computing solutions.”

Nvidia said it intends to continue investing in local Israeli “excellence and talent,” calling Israel “one of the world’s most important technology centers.”