Opportunities in AI for Australia and Israel

Renana Ashkenazi is a managing partner at Grove Ventures, an early-stage deep-tech venture fund based in Tel Aviv, and a Forbes contributor writing about AI.

She knows Australia well, visits several times per year, and spent time in Sydney and Melbourne just last week.

With that expertise and Australian connection, Ashkenazi shared some insights with The AJN on what the real opportunities in AI are for Israel and Australia.

Late last year, Micron, one of the world’s three dominant memory-chip manufacturers, announced it was shutting down Crucial – the consumer brand that had supplied memory for ordinary computers for 29 years.

“People hadn’t stopped buying laptops,” Ashkenazi said. “The chips were simply worth more inside AI data centres.

“That’s the story of this moment – that the price of intelligence keeps falling, while the price of everything it runs on keeps rising … power, memory, cooling systems and land.

“Australians have already seen what that scarcity is worth: in 2024 Blackstone and a Canadian pension fund paid more than $24 billion for AirTrunk, a Sydney company founded in 2015 that builds data centres.”

Ashkenazi said there is a second scarcity, “and it matters more for our two countries”.

“The internet gave AI an extraordinary head start: decades of text, images and code that someone else had already collected.

“The next great source of intelligence is far harder to reach, because the physical world was never indexed.

“Much of what happens inside factories, power grids, ports, intersections and mines was never recorded, or sits locked inside systems that don’t talk to one another.

“Whoever builds the infrastructure to collect and use that data will hold an advantage that is extraordinarily difficult to replicate.”

On that note, Ashkenazi highlighted how Australia owns an enormous share of that unindexed world, citing Rio Tinto already running driverless trains hauling iron ore across the Pilbara.

And how Israel has spent decades building the sensors, chips, and systems that turn physical things into data, and act on it.

She provided three examples of what that looks like, starting with making the physical world visible.

Wiliot – an Israeli company that Grove Ventures backed early – makes stamp-sized tags with no battery, that power themselves from the radio waves around them, and report where a product is, and its condition. Walmart is rolling them out on pallets in its US stores.

The second is AI that runs real infrastructure. NoTraffic – another Israeli company Grove Ventures backed – puts AI in charge of traffic lights. It sees every vehicle, cyclist and pedestrian, and re-times the signals as it goes. This year NoTraffic raised $US90 million ($129 million) to scale across North American cities.

The third example is the network underneath. Software can be copied and distributed around the world in seconds.

But deploying technology inside an operating mine, a national power grid, or a busy port, takes years of engineering, integration and trust.

“Those barriers, once seen as obstacles to growth, are becoming competitive advantages,” Ashkenazi said.

“Israeli deep-tech companies are building the technology to make those networks visible and manageable.

“Put Australia and Israel together … Australian industries need AI to work in the real world, and Israeli engineering is built for exactly those conditions.”