Israel's AI future will be decided inside data centers, and MedOne, Israel's leading cloud and data center provider, already operates six underground data centers and the cloud infrastructure Israeli organizations run on every day. Speaking at the National Infrastructure Conference of Calcalist and Bank Leumi, MedOne CEO Eitan Demri explained why AI has become critical national infrastructure - and what separates providers built for it from everyone else.
Why does Israel's AI future start with data centers?
Israel's AI future starts with data centers because AI is only as strong as the power, cooling and connectivity underneath it. At the conference, NVIDIA's Yaniv Akirav described AI as a five-layer stack: energy at the bottom, then chips, then computing infrastructure, then models like GPT, Gemini and Claude, and applications at the top. Every new AI application increases demand for everything beneath it.
Demri's message was blunt. AI is critical and not a passing trend, he said; it is tied to civilian and military systems, and whoever fails to invest will be left behind. It also demands heavy investment in energy and water, and in his view the state woke up late to that need. (His remarks were made in Hebrew and are summarized here in English.)
Akirav added that NVIDIA's headquarters sees Israel as an excellent place to build AI factories, a potential he called a game changer for Israel. Realizing it depends on the data centers those factories run on.
What does serious AI infrastructure actually demand?
Serious AI infrastructure is an engineering discipline, not a real-estate one. AI cabinets draw many times the power of traditional server racks, so a facility's real ceiling is electricity and heat removal per square meter, not floor space. Many high-density AI systems are liquid-cooled, because air alone can no longer carry the heat away. Efficiency is measured in PUE, the ratio of a facility's total energy use to the energy reaching IT equipment: the closer to 1, the less energy is lost to overhead. MedOne states a design target of PUE below 1.15 for its new facilities, with zero water waste in cooling.
Then comes resilience. A data center faces two types of threats, Demri said at the panel: physical, such as missiles, and cyber - and disconnecting a facility from electricity does not solve a cyber problem. Infrastructure that is not resilient on both fronts is not ready for AI.
Finally, seriousness is a filter. Demri welcomed Israel's move toward power allocation: the amount of gigawatts requested is not rational, he said, and allocation will leave the players who invest for the long term.
Which organizations use MedOne's infrastructure?
MedOne's infrastructure serves the sectors Israel cannot afford to stop: government, defense, finance, health, insurance, energy and education, alongside global technology firms. Each sector arrives with its own demands.
For government and defense, data residency and control can be critical requirements, which a sovereign Israeli cloud is built to address. Finance and insurance need systems that stay available and recoverable, with recovery tested in practice rather than written on paper. Health organizations need sensitive records protected and accessible around the clock. Research and education benefit from MedOne's direct connection to the IUCC, the Inter-University Computation Center, while typical GPU-cloud workloads such as research simulations and medical imaging need on-demand GPU computing close to home. Energy and other critical industries need continuity through national emergencies, which is why MedOne's business continuity planning covers war, cyber events, earthquakes and extreme weather.
Different sectors, one shared requirement: systems that cannot stop.
How is MedOne built for this future?
MedOne's answer rests on four layers.
Underground facilities: six underground data centers across Israel, led by a Tier-IV certified flagship 15 meters underground, built to withstand earthquakes and missile strikes. MedOne states 99.999% uptime backed by its Tier-III and Tier-IV infrastructure, and a contractual commitment to keep operating at full load for 72 hours autonomously.
National connectivity: as Israel's interconnection hub, MedOne offers carrier-neutral access to all major Israeli network providers and direct access to all submarine cable operators.
Cloud and AI compute: a sovereign cloud and hybrid platform across three public cloud availability zones, and a GPU cloud that provides on-demand GPU computing for AI training and inference from MedOne's own data centers in Israel, so teams consume GPU power when needed instead of buying, housing and cooling the hardware themselves.
Continuity: MedOne DRaaS, a managed disaster recovery service built on HPE Zerto technology, replicates systems continuously and supports failover and recovery under a configured recovery plan, with recovery targets defined per workload.
And MedOne is still building: its published expansion plan includes more than 250 MW of IT capacity and 70,000 square meters of technical space across Tirat HaCarmel, Kfar Yona, Ramle and Dimona, with land and power already assured - capacity planned for the AI decade Demri described. All of it backed by Israeli support from people, not tickets.
FAQ
What makes a data center ready for AI?
A data center is ready for AI when it can deliver high power density, advanced cooling such as liquid cooling, dense carrier-neutral connectivity and resilience against both physical and cyber threats.
What are RPO and RTO in disaster recovery?
RPO, the recovery point objective, is the maximum data-loss window you can accept: how far back in time your last recoverable copy may be. RTO, the recovery time objective, is how fast systems must run again after a failure. In MedOne DRaaS both targets are defined per workload, and continuous replication supports failover and recovery under a configured recovery plan.