The high-tech crisis? The companies in Israel that are only growing and hiring
While software companies are cutting back, the hardware industry is experiencing growth thanks to the AI revolution. With stocks soaring and record demand for engineers, giants like Nvidia and Applied Materials are hiring vigorously. "More than 1,000 employees have started working with us in the last year, and we have more than 450 open positions," says Yael Aviram-Rosenfeld, recruitment director of Nvidia Israel, to mako.
While large parts of the Israeli high-tech sector continue to cut employees against the backdrop of the AI revolution and the low dollar, the hardware, chip, data center, and cyber market is actually expanding and struggling to fill positions. According to a report by the placement company Ethosia from June 2026, the Israeli hardware market has about 34,400 employees in engineering and research roles, and during that same period, 1,718 open positions were recorded. Just this week, Monday announced the layoff of 20% of its workforce, Moovit announced the layoff of about 30% of its employees, Wix also cut about 20% in May, and simultaneously, layoffs were recorded in companies such as MyHeritage, Redis, WSC Sports, and more. The trend is not stopping in Israel: Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, and Oracle have also laid off thousands of employees, and in the case of Amazon and Oracle, tens of thousands. What was until recently identified mainly with the difficulty of juniors finding their first job in high-tech is expanding to experienced employees as well, as the latest Employment Service report showed.
Alongside the companies affected by AI and "wave coding," there are areas where AI is actually a growth engine. The Israeli cyber industry is one example: even after the Wiz exit, companies like Cyera and Upwind continue to raise huge sums, and Cyera itself is already valued at 12 billion dollars. The logic is simple: every new technology needs a protection layer, and as cyberattacks become more sophisticated with the help of AI, security systems must also implement AI tools to deal with them.
Hardware is also returning to the center. After a decade in which software led the technological world, the demand is shifting again to silicon and the physical systems that support the AI revolution: data center facilities, autonomous vehicles, defense systems, digital medical equipment, and energy infrastructure. In order for AI models to be able to operate and process data, large computing power is required, which creates demand for advanced chips, renewable energy, and data centers with high levels of survivability and redundancy.
According to the Ethosia report, the center of gravity of the industry has moved from traditional computing, storage, and communication companies to the worlds of Silicon AI, data center infrastructures, ASICs Networking components, automotive chips, and defense electronics. The central problem is not a general shortage of engineers, but a shortage of experts with precise knowledge for the various development stages: chip architecture designers and system testers such as ASIC, RTL, Verification, and Physical Design, through RF and Analog experts to Firmware and Embedded engineers.
The semiconductor sector is the largest and most aggressive in hiring today: 15,500 hardware engineers work in it, which is 45.1% of the human capital in the field, and it holds 64% of the open positions. The report shows that the AI hardware field has become the most aggressive hiring engine and the sub-sector with the highest growth rate in the industry, partly due to the transition of giants like Nvidia, Apple, Amazon, and Microsoft to independent chip development in Israel. Simultaneously, the defense sector has become a direct competitor for the same pool of employees, and it employs 9,200 people, which is 26.7% of the market. It is estimated that 2027 will be even more challenging due to the worsening shortage of senior talent.
This trend can also be seen in the capital market, mainly in companies dealing with chips, memory cards, and storage, against the backdrop of a shortage of memory and storage chips that leads to price increases. Micron Technology stock, a manufacturer of DRAM memory chips and advanced storage components for server farms and computers, has risen by 204% since the beginning of the year. SanDisk stock, which specializes in Flash-based storage solutions, memory cards, and SSD drives, has risen by 481%.
Intel stock, which laid off about 40,000 employees in 2024–2025, about 4,000 of them in Israel, has also risen since the beginning of the year by 160% and by 336% in the last 12 months. And yet, this week it was published that Intel is planning another round of layoffs, in the scope of hundreds of employees, in the company's server chip division — precisely its fastest-growing division.
We are only at the beginning of an unprecedented move to build AI infrastructures.
Nvidia, the company with the highest value in the world as of today, more than 5 trillion dollars, stands at the head of AI chip production. Nvidia Israel currently employs more than 6,000 employees in Israel, more than 1,000 of them were recruited just in the last year, and it has more than 450 open positions.
"The AI revolution is increasing the demand for engineers in all fields," says Yael Aviram-Rosenfeld, recruitment director of Nvidia Israel, to mako. According to her, the demand for hardware and chip development is strengthening because they are at the base of AI infrastructures, but this does not come at the expense of software: behind every advanced chip are also millions of lines of code. She added that at Nvidia there are more software engineers than hardware and chip development engineers.
According to Aviram-Rosenfeld, the central change in hiring patterns is not a sharp transition from one field to another, but an expansion of the scope of recruitment and its variety. The company is looking for employees throughout the career sequence, from students and juniors to experienced engineers and managers.
Aviram-Rosenfeld rejects the definition of a shift of the center of gravity from software to hardware, and speaks of parallel growth and deepening the connection between the fields. She quoted Jensen, Nvidia's CEO, who describes AI as a five-layer cake: energy, chips, infrastructures, models, and applications. "So it's not about a shift of the center of gravity from software to hardware, but a growth of the entire ecosystem," she says.
One of the fields that Aviram-Rosenfeld marks as one that does not always receive enough exposure is Product Engineering. According to her, this is a development field that connects product development with bringing chips and systems to production on a large scale, with the required quality and reliability. The engineers in the field are involved throughout the product's life and influence the way it is designed, developed, and matures into a product that is distributed on a wide scale.
At Nvidia, according to her, product engineers are also partners in CPO development, a technology that combines optical communication alongside the chip, to allow large AI systems to transfer large amounts of information and work as one system. Another field she mentions is chip development and design, which allows engineers to influence the technology from its basic levels. According to her, at Nvidia, AI is not only the destination of the technologies being developed, but also a central tool in the development process, which gives engineers superpowers in dealing with complex challenges.
The activity in Israel, according to Aviram-Rosenfeld, focuses on technologies that allow hundreds of thousands of graphic processors to work together as one unit and drive the AI factories. She described the technologies developed in Israel as systems that connect chips and systems on a huge scale and serve as the nervous system of AI.
In the recruitment roles themselves, the bulk of the open positions are in engineering and development, but not only in hardware. Aviram-Rosenfeld says that the company is recruiting in significant volumes for software engineering, hardware, chip development, architects, system and communication engineers, security experts, and AI researchers.
On the question of whether there is a shortage of talent in the hardware and chip fields, Aviram-Rosenfeld says that Israel enjoys a good base in the field, so she would not define the situation as a sweeping shortage. However, the challenge is more felt in roles that require deep expertise, such as chip design and development, architecture, and system engineering, and mainly among experienced engineers whose knowledge was built over years.
According to her estimate, the demand for hardware engineers will continue to grow in the coming years, because the move to build AI infrastructures is still at its beginning. She says that these are fields that require deep technological knowledge and expertise that is built over years, so the company works with engineering faculties in universities and colleges, recruits young engineers, and accompanies them in training and long-term professional development. According to her, one of the significant challenges is the pace of technological development, which requires continuous updating of both academic training and training within the organization.
The new Nvidia development center in Be'er Sheva is part of the company's expansion strategy in Israel, according to Aviram-Rosenfeld. She says that the establishment of the site stems from the understanding that there is human capital in Israel far beyond the borders of the center of the country and from the desire to strengthen the connection between academia and industry. About 150 employees are currently employed at the site in Be'er Sheva, and in the coming years, the company plans to add hundreds of additional employees to them and deepen the cooperation with the academia in the city.
"Recognizing the growing need for demand for hardware engineers"
Another company that is recruiting against this background is Applied Materials Israel, which develops equipment for semiconductor manufacturing processes. The company recently announced a strategic cooperation with TSMC to accelerate the development of next-generation technologies and is investing about 5 billion dollars in establishing the EPIC center in Silicon Valley. Simultaneously, it is developing advanced packaging systems and materials engineering technologies designed to reduce energy consumption and accelerate chip speed.
Today, more than 200 positions are open at Applied Materials, of which more than 50 are intended for students and fresh graduates, precisely in a period when juniors are having difficulty finding work in high-tech. "The surge in demand for AI chips is driving an unprecedented growth momentum in our activity," said Leon Steiman, recruitment manager at Applied Materials. "The production of the most advanced chips in the world relies on our technologies and systems, so we are looking for the next generation of engineers and researchers who will develop the infrastructures for the next decade. These days we are recruiting for a wide variety of roles, in the worlds of development, research, and production — from software engineers and Deep Learning researchers and DevOps personnel, to industrial management students and electronics engineers, who want to take part in the great revolution of our time."
"We recognize the growing need for demand for hardware engineers, and it is directly related to the stage that the AI revolution has entered," says Miri Hayun, HR manager at Marvell Israel. According to her, in recent years many Israelis were attracted to the worlds of software, which were perceived as a central engine of technological innovation. "AI does not reduce the importance of software, but has created a new reality in which the world of employment in the field is undergoing rapid changes," she says.
At Marvell, they claim that the expansion of AI systems sharpens the need for hardware engineers. As AI systems rely on a larger number of processors and accelerators, the amounts of information passing between the components grow and require solutions in the fields of connectivity, memory, and electricity consumption.
Marvell develops customized chips and connectivity solutions for AI infrastructures and data centers. The company's development centers in Petah Tikva and Yokneam participate in its global developments. Today, about 500 employees are employed at Marvell Israel, after a growth of about 10% in the last year, and the company has dozens of open positions in engineering fields.
Hayun says that alongside the demand for engineers, it is a competitive market where companies also compete for experienced employees. "These are professions that require a strong engineering base, practical experience, and the ability to work on very complex systems," she says. According to her, AI tools do not replace hardware engineers, but allow them to deal with more complex systems and improve development processes.
The energy field is also entering the chain. Enlight company presents data centers as a growth engine that connects to the core of its activity in renewable energy. The company is promoting in Israel the establishment of facilities near electricity production sources, including a project in Ashalim in the Negev on an area of about 200 dunams. The project is expected to include a server farm with a capacity of about 100 megawatts alongside solar energy and energy storage facilities. Simultaneously, the company continues to promote additional projects in the country and in the world, and was recently included in the CofaceBDi ranking of the 100 best companies to work for in Israel.
"The AI revolution is changing the demand for electricity and creating a real need for renewable energy," says Gilad Doron, VP HR at Enlight. "The accelerated growth of server farms requires a corresponding and fast energy response. Solar energy projects are among the cheapest and fastest to establish electricity sources, alongside their clear environmental contribution, so the combination of renewable energy production and energy storage is becoming a central component of the infrastructure that will allow the establishment of additional server farms." On the work environment, he adds: "This is a place for people who want to influence, grow, and do good."
The third layer in the chain is the data centers themselves. Bynet Data Centers, from the Rad-Bynet group, establishes and operates facilities designed to deal with AI system loads, while integrating advanced cooling systems, including liquid cooling. The group builds fast communication networks for real-time data processing and offers cloud solutions, cyber security, and DevOps services.
"At Bynet Data Centers, we are building the physical architecture of AI," says David Biran, VP Operations at the company. "Our teams specialize in advanced maintenance methods with 24/7 operation. Therefore, we are looking for a wide range of talent and offer an exceptional opportunity to work on the most complex and largest tenders in the economy, where the most innovative technology meets the most critical defense and civil needs of the State of Israel."
