The first phase of Israel’s national AI supercomputer went live in January: 1,000 Nvidia B200 chips that Israeli startups can rent in slices as small as sixteen. On June 16, the cabinet approved a national target of 100,000.

The gap between those two numbers is now official state policy, and the three weeks that followed the vote tell you how seriously to take it. Between June 16 and July 8, in three announcements that almost nobody has connected, Israel’s government, its tech industry, and its army all began reorganizing themselves around artificial intelligence.

On June 16 the cabinet passed the new national AI program, Government Decision 4255. Its centerpiece is access, within five years, to computing power equivalent to 100,000 AI accelerators, alongside a National AI Institute, a national quantum computer built as far as possible on Israeli technology, Hebrew-language models, and a directive to treat the government’s own data as a strategic national asset. On July 5 the National AI Directorate held its first working session with industry at Industry House, with Oracle, Check Point, Armis, Kaltura, ELTA and others in the room to map who builds what. And on July 8, IDF Chief of Staff Eyal Zamir told graduates of the National Security College that the army will soon finalize a new General Staff structure dedicated to robotics, drones, and artificial intelligence.

Netanyahu compressed the strategy into one sentence:

We will turn Israel into a global AI superpower, just as we did with cyber.

We will turn Israel into a global AI superpower, just as we did with cyber.

The cyber playbook, run again

That line is not rhetoric; it is a literal description of the org chart. In August 2011, Government Resolution 3611 created a National Cyber Bureau inside the........

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