Huang's exit puts a spotlight on Israel's dependence on Nvidia, which drove about 40% of its 2025 growth
What's the story? Jensen Huang's resignation as CEO of Nvidia has turned attention to how much Israel's economy now leans on a single company. Nvidia's operations in Israel are its largest outside the US, and Israeli economists and investors are asking what a leadership change could mean for jobs, exports and tax revenue.
By the numbers: Israel's Central Bureau of Statistics data show the economy grew 3.5% in 2025 but would have grown only about 2.1% without Nvidia, according to Globes, so roughly 1.4 percentage points, or about 40% of the year's growth, came from one company. Nvidia has close to 6,000 employees in Israel, up from just over 3,000 in October 2023. In Nvidia's second quarter, operations managed from Israel produced $17.5 billion of sales, a record 18% of the company's revenue, making Nvidia Israel the country's highest-revenue business entity, ahead of Teva's $4.1 billion for the quarter. Nvidia paid $1.287 billion of tax in Israel in its last fiscal year.
The fiscal angle: Israeli tax revenues were 13.3% higher in January to September than a year earlier, driven largely by Nvidia's tax payments, according to S&P and Globes. One economist quoted by Globes estimates Nvidia pays around US$639.5M of tax a quarter, about 0.5% of GDP. The Bank of Israel last month raised its 2026 growth forecast to 5.6% from 4%, citing advanced technology sales led by Nvidia; excluding that effect it sees growth of 3.4%.
How it got here: The base is Mellanox, the Israeli networking chip company Nvidia bought for about $7 billion in 2019. Nvidia kept it as an Israeli company, recording its revenue and intellectual property in Israel, and its networking division has become one of Nvidia's fastest-growing businesses. Under Huang, Nvidia also committed to a campus in Kiryat Tivon, near Haifa, designed for up to 10,000 new jobs, with construction planned from 2027 to 2031.
The debate: Gilad Levy, writing on X, compared the concentration to Nokia in Finland in the early 2000s, when, he wrote, Nokia accounted for around 4% of GDP and about a quarter of exports before its share collapsed in the smartphone era, and argued Israel needs to diversify its growth engines. Others expect the ties to hold. "Nvidia's core ties to Israel remain structurally resilient as its local R&D centers form the irreplaceable engineering backbone of the company's networking architecture," Tal Aspir, head of the AI Lab at BDO, told The Times of Israel. Two of the names linked to the top job, CTO Michael Kagan and Apple's Johny Srouji, are Israeli.
Sources: Globes, 12 November 2026
The Times of Israel, 12 November 2026
Globes, 12 October 2026
Calcalist, 11 November 2026
Globes, 26 February 2026
Gilad Levy on X
Photo: Nvidia's Yokneam office, Amir Shtanger, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
