The Media Line: Could AI Drive the Future of the Abraham Accords? 

Could AI Drive the Future of the Abraham Accords? 

When the regional war ends, and collaboration with more Gulf countries is expected to begin, “one of the first things that moves forward is a regional collaboration for AI,” says Judah Taub, managing partner at Hetz Ventures 

By Maayan Hoffman/The Media Line  

The next step for the Abraham Accords may come not through a ‘pathway to a Palestinian state,’ but through artificial intelligence. 

According to Ofer Shacham, co-founder and CEO of Majestic Labs, and Judah Taub, managing partner at Hetz Ventures, a combination of Gulf region energy resources and Israeli server architecture, intellectual property, and technological ingenuity could propel the Middle East into the next AI revolution. 

“This region is primed for an AI upgrade,” Shacham told a small group of journalists this week over dinner in Jerusalem. “The whole Gulf region has energy. Israel has the technology and the talent … Everybody basically wants to work together to build the next AI revolution in this region. It’s going to happen eventually.” 

Shacham explained that different parts of the region have different strengths and that “together we are able to solve a much bigger problem than each one of us separately.” Moreover, he added that, from a development perspective, this region has not yet reached the level of AI adoption seen in other parts of the world. As such, there is enormous potential for growth. Fast growth, he said, comes from technology and access to power. 

When speaking about AI, many people do not realize that any country hoping to compete in the field must consider how many gigawatts of electricity it can dedicate to the technology. 

“When you hear of AWS [Amazon Web Services], Google, Anthropic, and OpenAI, they all are now talking about how many gigawatts of AI they’re going to create, because they’re slowly realizing that the number one issue they’re all going to run into is that there simply isn’t enough electricity,” Taub explained.  

To put that into perspective, Taub noted that experiments at CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research) use about 0.2 to 0.3 gigawatts at peak, while OpenAI is planning data centers that require around 1 gigawatt—five times the sum—to be used continuously throughout the year. Starlink has projected demand of 10 gigawatts, and Elon Musk has floated figures as high as 100 gigawatts, with one gigawatt roughly equivalent to the power consumption of 1 million homes. 

In Israel, according to Taub, the country’s total electricity production is around 27 gigawatts. Therefore, Taub said he believes that when the regional war finally ends, and collaboration with more Gulf countries like Saudi Arabia is expected to begin, “one of the first things that moves forward is a regional collaboration for AI.” 

Energy, he said, is exactly what Saudi Arabia has in abundance, while Israel’s technological expertise makes the partnership a natural win-win. 

 

There are additional factors at play. Once electricity is generated, it has to power something. That is where companies such as Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company and Nvidia come in. At the same time, new regulations are emerging that could limit who can buy advanced AI technologies and from whom. 

“Governments have realized that these are, to an extent, the nuclear facilities of the future, and by selling some of these, you’re helping people that you might not want to leapfrog or do things that they otherwise can’t,” Taub said. 

Shacham’s Majestic Labs, which launched only a month after the October 7, 2023, massacre, is rethinking server architecture from the memory up, with the goal of replacing racks of today’s hardware with a single, far more capable system. 

“We started Majestic Labs to build AI infrastructure for the world with that notion and vision of ubiquitous AI; we want to bring it to everyone,” Shacham said. 

Today, AI infrastructure often requires about 40 refrigerator-sized racks of Nvidia hardware, as Taub described. Majestic Labs is trying to reduce that to something closer to the size of a microwave. 

Shacham explained that memory has become one of the industry’s biggest bottlenecks and that only a handful of companies manufacture it. Countries are increasingly competing for memory supply and related technologies, he added, a core thesis behind Majestic Labs. 

“What Majestic gives you is 10 times, 50 times, sometimes 100 times more users per kilowatt invested in that data center,” Shacham specified. “Ten times to 100 times more users per $1 million invested in that data center, that’s our advantage.” 

As it says on the company’s website: “One Majestic rack holds the fast memory capacity of 25 Nvidia NVL72 Vera Rubin racks at a fraction of the power. Organizations that could never justify hyperscaler infrastructure can now run any workload.” 

Shacham said the company is expected to deliver its first servers next year and already has orders worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Data centers and foundational AI companies, he explained, are seeking ways to increase revenue and efficiency from investments that already involve massive amounts of capital. 

In general, Taub said, Israel is known for building high-quality, optimized data centers. In addition, the country is particularly strong when it comes to the application layer, the software layer that sits on top of platforms like OpenAI or Anthropic. 

“We’re seeing an explosion of apps,” he said. 

Taub’s Hetz Ventures invests at the earliest stages in Israeli companies building the foundational layers of cybersecurity and AI infrastructure, the parts of the stack that quietly determine whether everything above them works. 

“We’re typically the first check, the first ticket into these startups,” Taub said. “We’re writing tickets anywhere from the smallest, which will be a million dollars, and up to maybe 10 million. It really depends on the company, and we’re doing this somewhere between six and eight times a year.” 

 

The venture capital firm has already seen several notable successes, including Granulate, which Hetz seeded at a $6.4 million valuation and which was later sold to Intel for $650 million. Intel shut down Granulate in 2024. 

Hetz also seeded the Israeli cybersecurity startup Silk Security, which was acquired by Armis Security in April 2024 for $150 million. 

Shacham said Israel became a global technology powerhouse, rather than focusing on industries like car manufacturing, partly because of its scale and partly because it is far easier to move bits, software, and intellectual property than physical goods when a country is constantly at war and surrounded by challenging geography. 

“Half of my company is in the US. I work with Europe, I work with Paris. I work with the Gulf States. They are fighting over us because what we have is easily transferable and very hard to come by,” Shacham said. 

He added that another advantage of collaborating with the Gulf States is the time zone. Nobody needs to work overnight in order to collaborate within the region. 

“The biggest market for Israeli technology is still going to be the US and Europe … but there is a cherry on top, because if the Abraham Accords can continue, if there is more stability in the region, this region as a whole could be very prosperous,” Shacham said. 

He admitted that while Saudi Arabia is showing all the signs of wanting to modernize and invest in technology, Majestic Labs has not yet been able to translate that interest into a signed contract. However, he said the conversations are already happening. 

“For this region to be successful, you need to create business opportunities together,” Shacham concluded. “We need to work together so that we break down those walls, because that’s not going to come from the political aspects. It’s going to come from companies wanting to do stuff together … I think it’s pretty soon that we will have that.”