Nvidia Corp (NVDA.O), the world’s most valuable listed chip company, said on Monday it was building Israel’s most powerful artificial intelligence (AI) supercomputer to meet soaring customer demand for AI applications.

The cloud-based system, called Israel-1, is expected to cost hundreds of millions of dollars and be partly operational by the end of 2023. It will deliver performance of up to eight exaflops of AI computing, making it one of the world’s fastest AI supercomputers. One exaflop has the ability to perform 1 quintillion – or 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 – calculations per second.

Nvidia said the system would enable Israeli companies and researchers to use AI for a variety of applications, such as healthcare, cybersecurity, autonomous driving, smart cities and natural language processing. The system will also support the development of local AI talent and startups.

Nvidia’s vice president and general manager for Europe, Middle East and Africa, Jaap Zuiderveld, said: “Israel is a global leader in AI innovation and we are proud to partner with the Israeli government and industry to build this state-of-the-art system. Israel-1 will provide unprecedented computing power and capabilities to fuel AI breakthroughs across sectors and domains.”

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