The Prime Minister’s Office quietly released Israel’s national plan to accelerate artificial intelligence last week, aiming to make the country a global leader and strengthen its technological independence. The plan, led by the National AI Headquarters in the Prime Minister’s Office, calls for sovereign infrastructure and an unprecedented purchase of 100,000 GPUs for government and economic use.
Prof. Nadav Cohen, a computer science and AI researcher at Tel Aviv University and co-founder of imubit, said the target could easily cost tens of billions of dollars. If the hardware is based on advanced Nvidia systems such as the H100, he said, the expense would be enormous, and the equipment would also need replacement after two to four years because AI chips age quickly. He argued that full independence across all layers of the stack is unrealistic, since almost no country is completely self-sufficient in computing.
Cohen said Israel should focus on Physical AI, especially edge systems that operate in the real world, such as industrial software for factory production lines or mechanical arms. He said Israel has an advantage in these areas because of its experience with systems operating in complex, critical environments, and because safety and reliability are essential when mistakes are costly. He added that it is better for Israel to excel in a few fields than try to do everything.
The Israeli plan comes amid a global technology race. The United States relies mainly on private-sector infrastructure from companies such as Nvidia, Oracle, Amazon, Microsoft, and Google. Europe is building more centralized computing infrastructure across six sites to preserve digital sovereignty, while China is pouring hundreds of billions of dollars into state-controlled computing to reduce dependence on Western chips.
The plan also includes a push for a national quantum computer based on Israeli technology. That project began in 2021 with closed discussions by the National Forum for Research and Technology Infrastructure and MAFAT, and was launched publicly in February 2022 under then-Prime Minister Naftali Bennett with a dedicated budget of about 200 million shekels. Cohen said quantum computing should not be linked too closely to AI yet, because AI is an immediate priority while quantum contributions remain a future prospect.
