Nvidia has established a medical and scientific artificial intelligence research group at its Israeli development centre to work on genomics and materials science, Calcalist reported on September 23.

The Applied AI Architecture group was formed under the direct mandate of global chief technology officer Michael Kagan and will be led by Nati Daniel, a former Intel and Huawei executive. It extends Nvidia's Israeli operation beyond chip and interconnect engineering into applied research, in a market that has become the company's largest base outside the US.

The unit is co-developing a genomic foundation model with Sheba Medical Centre and Mount Sinai Hospital in New York, aimed at mapping the 98% of the human genome that remains uncharacterised. Sheba recently became the first hospital outside the US to obtain early access to OpenAI's medical models.

The group will also feed into Nvidia's $1bn, five-year joint venture with Eli Lilly on drug discovery, and anchors the European Union's GENMAT initiative, backed by a €6mn Horizon grant, to engineer advanced materials for the aviation and automotive sectors.

Nvidia's Israeli headcount has more than doubled since its $6.9bn acquisition of interconnect maker Mellanox in 2020, to more than 5,000 staff across seven research centres. About a fifth of group revenue now flows through the Israeli unit, against roughly 16% a year earlier.

The company is committing about $1.5bn to a data centre under construction at the Mevo Carmel industrial park near Yokneam, adding to a $500mn server farm at Ramot Menashe. The site's electrical capacity could reach 100 MW, which would make it Israel's most powerful AI computing cluster and supply the compute the new group requires for genomic model training.

It inaugurated a 3,000 sqm R&D centre in Beer Sheba in July and has said its Kiryat Tiv'on campus will grow to more than 10,000 employees by the end of the decade. Nvidia vice president of software engineering Ali Ayoub has said northern Israel is set to become a hub of the global AI industry.

The expansion continues in spite of US export controls on advanced AI chips, which have constrained Nvidia's planning in other markets.