Tech giant Nvidia is canceling offline sessions at its annual AI Summit scheduled for October 15-16 in Tel Aviv due to concerns about the security situation in Israel.
Nvidia confirmed this news to the first financial reporter, mainly out of consideration for the safety of participants, and the arrangement of the online meeting has yet to be further confirmed. According to the original plan, Nvidia will show its latest progress in the field of artificial intelligence on the occasion of the AI Summit, and Nvidia founder and CEO Jen-Hsun Huang will also give a keynote speech at the AI Summit.
Tel Aviv has long been considered an important "innovation capital" globally, with many AI hardware and software researchers and developers based in Israel. The Nvidia AI Summit was scheduled to cover a wide range of AI applications, such as generative AI, healthcare, large-scale language models, cybersecurity, robotics, metaverse, and self-driving cars.
In May, Nvidia announced that it was building a new generation of artificial intelligence supercomputer systems in israel, Israel-1, a project that will cost hundreds of millions of dollars and is expected to begin partial production by the end of this year. A major feature of this system is its powerful computing performance, which is expected to break the bottleneck faced by existing artificial intelligence technology.
mellanox, a technology company that Nvidia acquired for $7 billion four years ago, is also from Israel. In addition, Nvidia works with 800 startups and nearly 10,000 software engineers in Israel through programs such as the Start-up Acceleration Program.
Nvidia's research and development activities in Israel are the company's largest outside the United States. The company has seven research and development centers in Tel Aviv, Yorknimu, Raianana, and Beersheba. The local workforce is about 3,000, or 12 percent of Nvidia's global workforce.
For nearly a decade, high-tech has been Israel's fastest-growing sector, accounting for 14 percent of jobs and nearly a fifth of economic output. But unrest in Israel this year has affected the country's attractiveness as a high-tech investment destination.
According to data from Israel's IVC Research Center and LeumiTech, the technology arm of the National Bank of Israel, Israeli tech startups raised $1.37 billion in the third quarter of this year, a step down from the $1.78 billion raised in the second quarter and a sharp 38 percent drop from the same period last year. In 2022, Israeli startups raised a total of nearly $16 billion in funding.