Asia Tech Wire (Apr 26) -- Nvidia Corp (NVDA:NASDAQ) on Wednesday announced a definitive agreement to acquire Israeli artificial intelligence startup Run:ai.

The U.S. chipmaker said in a statement that it has been working closely with Run:ai since 2020.

Nvidia did not disclose the terms of the deal, but Israeli media outlet Calcalist expected the deal to be worth around $700 million.

Israel is Nvidia's second most important market, and the company has been operating in the country since 2016.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said in an interview in late March that the company employs 3,300 people in Israel, representing 13% of its global workforce.

The acquisition, if it is worth $700 million, would be Nvidia's largest in the country since it acquired Mellanox in March 2019 for $6.9 billion.

Upon completion of the deal, Run:ai employees will join Nvidia's growing local operations.

Founded in 2018, Run:ai has developed an orchestration and virtualization software layer that specifically targets the unique needs of AI workloads running on GPUs and similar chipsets.