Israel plans a 200 MW cap on data centers, OpenWeb staff threaten liquidation, and IAI faces an IPO deadline

Noa Israel's electricity regulator wants to limit every new data center to 200 megawatts. Calcalist reports developers have asked to connect about 27,000 megawatts, roughly three times what the whole country uses on average.

Noa Two planned giants would be blocked.

Noa Good morning, it's Monday, the nineteenth of October. I'm Noa.

Eli And I'm Eli. Today: a power cap for data centers, OpenWeb's employees threaten to seek liquidation, a deadline for Israel Aerospace Industries' IPO, and senior departures at monday.com.

Noa Calcalist reports that the Electricity Authority published the outline of its framework for connecting large data centers on Sunday evening. Each new facility would be capped at 200 megawatts. The authority will set aside 1,000 megawatts for large data centers, and another 300 for government and defense needs.

Eli Add the roughly 2,000 megawatts already approved, and Calcalist says the total reaches about 3,300, around a fifth of the electricity Israel is expected to use in 2030. CTech notes a single 200 megawatt site draws about as much as a mid-sized city like Rehovot or Holon.

Noa The demand explains the limit. Noga, which runs the grid, received requests totaling about 27,000 megawatts, and responses were frozen. To deter speculation and trading in approvals, developers will have to post guarantees of 2 million shekels for every megawatt they request.

Eli Calcalist says the cap blocks two proposed mega facilities, of 500 and 1,100 megawatts, that have already applied. A 200 megawatt data center costs more than 4 billion shekels to build. And data centers will need backup arrangements so they can be cut off from the grid at times of extreme demand.

Noa The grid is already stretched. CTech reports Israel set a consumption record of 17,282 megawatts in the August 2025 heat wave, against about 18,800 megawatts of generating capacity.

Eli Shelly Lanzman, a former chief executive of Microsoft Israel, told CTech data centers should be treated as national infrastructure, like power plants and airports. The full decision is due in the coming days, followed by a three-week public hearing, and Calcalist says it could still change.

Noa OpenWeb. Earlier this month we told you a Tel Aviv court had appointed a temporary trustee for the company, which makes comment software for news sites. Now Globes reports that more than 40 of its 55 employees in Israel are demanding to be paid from company funds.

Eli They want their wages and social benefits paid from the company's cash, which Globes puts at about 20 million shekels. If not, they say they will petition for liquidation, so they can claim from National Insurance. They say they fear working on without being paid.

Noa Judge Hagai Brenner has approved a recovery plan that cuts about 70 of the 150 employees, leaving 80. He did not rule out a recovery, but told the trustee, Ehud Gindes, to report any deterioration that could lead to liquidation.

Eli The court filings show how far the forecasts have fallen. According to Globes, OpenWeb had projected $257 million in revenue for 2026. The revised forecast is $110 million. Its valuation fell from $1.3 billion in 2022 to $500 million last year, and a recent $97 million purchase offer was not completed.

Noa The fight with the lender goes on. The judge ordered Liquidity, whose debt fund is owed about $60 million, to return money taken from OpenWeb-linked accounts. Liquidity says the ruling means nothing in practice, because it collected nothing from the Israeli company's accounts. It accuses the controlling funds, Insight Partners and Georgian, of not putting in capital.

Noa Israel Aerospace Industries has six weeks to fix a regulatory problem standing in the way of its IPO, CTech reports. The issue is how the state-owned company discloses information about classified work, such as the Arrow 3 missile-defense system.

Eli The deadline is December 1. Without a solution by then, CTech says, IAI may have to redeem its only bond series, worth 154 million shekels, about $50 million, and could lose its status as a reporting company.

Noa Deputy Attorney General Gil Limon has told the company the necessary milestones have not been met. With Knesset elections next week, it is unclear whether the Justice Ministry will act in time. Calcalist has learned IAI executives are considering an urgent court petition.

Eli The stakes are large. IAI plans to sell at least 20 percent of its shares to institutional investors, at a valuation of about 100 billion shekels, about $33 billion. In the first half of 2026 its sales rose 33 percent to $4.27 billion, and its order backlog reached a record of about $35 billion.

Noa One source told Calcalist a delay could set the company back decades.

Noa Calcalist reports a series of senior departures at monday.com. Two vice presidents of product, a vice president of engineering and a senior IT director are expected to leave within weeks, and another engineering vice president left last month.

Eli It follows the reorganization monday.com announced in July, cutting about 20 percent of its global workforce, roughly 620 people, as it shifts from work-management software to an AI platform where people and AI tools carry out tasks together.

Noa The company says the changes reflect management decisions and some managers' personal choices, that this is not only about cutting costs, and that it will keep hiring in key areas.

Eli The business is still growing. Second-quarter revenue rose about 22 percent to $364.6 million. But Calcalist, citing MarketBeat, says the shares are down about 36 percent this year, for a market value of about $4 billion.

Noa Now the quick round-up.

Eli Israeli tech employed about 400,000 people in 2025, about 18,000 fewer than its pre-pandemic growth would have produced, according to a Phoenix Institute paper at Reichman University reported by CTech. AI companies' share of capital raised rose from about 13 percent to 35 percent in three years.

Noa Israeli AI safety company Alice and model developer AI21 say they trained one of NVIDIA's open Nemotron models to resist prompt injection, hidden instructions that hijack AI assistants. Ynetnews notes the reported 41-point improvement comes from the companies' own tests, not independent evaluations.

Eli On Friday we told you researchers tied the Israeli ad firm Discover-Tech to Candiru spyware. PPC Land reports Google and the industry group IAB Europe removed Discover-Tech from their vendor lists in early October. Discover-Tech did not respond to the researchers.

Noa Three Israeli companies made TIME's list of the year's best inventions, Globes reports: SpotitEarly, which uses trained dogs and AI to flag possible cancer from air samples, Beewise and its robotic beehives, and Bria AI, whose system pays royalties to creators whose work shaped an AI image.

Eli And Colmobil, Israel's largest car group, is on day five of a cyber incident. Globes says some systems at its dealerships, garages and parts division were still not fully back at the start of the week. The company says it is investigating and has notified the regulators.

Eli One thing to watch: December 1. That is when Israel Aerospace Industries' only bond series falls due, and unless the disclosure problem is solved first, its planned IPO could stall.

Noa Sources told Calcalist the Securities Authority may have to grant an exceptional extension, as it has for IAI before.

Eli Follow Israel Tech Daily wherever you get your podcasts, and read more at startuptofollow.com.

Noa See you tomorrow morning.