Kardan Israel Advances AI Infrastructure Venture via Hut 8 Link

Kardan Israel is advancing negotiations to establish an artificial intelligence infrastructure venture in Israel in partnership with Highrise AI, a subsidiary of the American firm Hut 8. While market rumors previously suggested a direct agreement between Kardan and AI giant Anthropic, the connection is indirect but highlights significant potential in the AI sector.

The Venture and Infrastructure Plans

According to the details emerging from the negotiations, the planned venture will be controlled by Highrise and will focus on developing, deploying, and operating advanced computing infrastructure for artificial intelligence, as well as providing GPU-based computing services to customers in Israel and globally. In the initial phase, the operations are expected to rely on the data center owned by Kardan and its partners in Shoham.

The discussions are still ongoing, and no binding agreement has been signed yet, apart from clauses concerning confidentiality and exclusivity in Israel. Kardan noted that the finalization of a binding agreement depends on completing commercial and financial conditions, and there is no certainty that the venture will ultimately be established.

Global Partnerships and Energy Demands

Highrise's parent company, Hut 8, previously known as a major Bitcoin mining enterprise, entered into a massive partnership in December 2025 with Anthropic and Fluidstack to build large-scale AI infrastructure in the United States. The companies are developing facilities with a capacity of at least 245 megawatts, with an expansion agreement reaching up to 2.2 gigawatts.

Anthropic, the developer of the Claude AI model, serves as the end-client for the computing power built and operated by Fluidstack. Hut 8 is responsible for developing the data center infrastructure and supplying the required capacity, while Fluidstack operates the computing infrastructure for Anthropic.

Local Market Impact

Following the reports, Kardan's stock responded with a sharp increase of over 10%. Kardan Israel operates in income-producing real estate and is controlled by Avner Schnur, Gil Deutsch, and Roni Biram. The company concentrates its server operations in a dedicated subsidiary led by CEO Benny Malca, former Chief Technology Officer at Dell Technologies.

Large AI models are massive consumers of computing power, requiring thousands of graphic processors running simultaneously for weeks or months. While Anthropic is already commercially active in Israel through cloud services provided by AWS and Google, it has not yet established dedicated local computing infrastructure or its own data centers.