Data centers in Israel: 3 projects mapped

Israel wants to be an AI infrastructure hub and has run out of grid to do it with. On July 20, 2026 the Electricity Authority froze new grid connection applications from data centers of 8 megawatts or more for 140 days, until early December, calling it an "emergency brake". Calcalist reported that the grid operator, Noga, had received about 19,000 MW of new data center requests in two months on top of a backlog of about 8,000 MW, for roughly 27,000 MW in all, against average national consumption of about 9,000 MW and a peak of about 17,000 MW in August 2025. The authority said existing commitments to connect about 1.5 gigawatts of data centers already use up the power sector's planned generation capacity through 2035, and warned that more could raise natural gas use and consumer prices. "These are insane numbers, and there is no scenario in which we can catch up with such demand," a senior electricity official told Calcalist.

The rush followed government policy. DCD reported that the Knesset in February passed the National Cyber Defense Bill, which defined data centers as national infrastructure to strip away planning and construction constraints, and in June the government approved a national plan to accelerate AI. During the freeze the authority, the energy ministry and Noga are drafting criteria to separate serious projects from speculative ones; the authority had already been working on a rule that would make developers pay millions of shekels a year to hold a place in the queue. Noga said the question is "how it is right to allocate a limited public and infrastructure resource among all the needs of the economy." At least one developer, VisionWave, dropped plans for a hyperscale site in Israel, citing the pause, and shares of the data center developer Mega Or fell 6 per cent on the announcement. Noga said its development plan dated from 2021, when data center demand was far lower, though it had still approved about 2,000 MW of connections, and warned that more would push natural gas use beyond forecasts at a time when Israel has committed to large exports, including the Leviathan partnership's deal with Egypt valued at about $35 billion.

The largest operator on the ground is Amazon Web Services. It opened its Israel cloud region in August 2023 after winning, with Google, the government's $1.2 billion Project Nimbus cloud tender; local press placed its data centers at Tnuvot in the Sharon region, at Shoham, and at the Har Tov industrial park near Beit Shemesh. In November 2025 Globes reported that AWS had signed a letter of intent to lease a 42-dunam (10.5-acre) lot near Tnuvot, east of Netanya, where a 60,000-square-meter data center of 35 to 40 MW could be built, roughly doubling its processing capacity in Israel. DCD reported in June 2026 that Crusoe plans to invest about $10 billion in Israeli data centers over 10 to 15 years through leases.

Every project above is drawn from public records, filings and local reporting. Each row links to what it is based on. Statuses change, so check the source date before you rely on one. Found something wrong? Write to [email protected] and it gets fixed.