Nvidia to acquire Mellanox for $6.9 billion

Nvidia is to acquire Mellanox, a leading supplier of end-to-end Ethernet and InfiniBand smart interconnect solutions and services for servers and storage, for a total enterprise value of approximately $6.9 billion (Rs 43,587 crore).

The acquisition will unite two of the world’s leading companies in high performance computing (HPC). Together, Nvidia’s computing platform and Mellanox’s interconnects power over 250 of the world’s top 500 supercomputers and have as customers every major cloud service provider and computer maker.

The data and compute intensity of modern workloads in AI, scientific computing and data analytics is growing exponentially and has put enormous performance demands on hyperscale and enterprise datacenters. While computing demand is surging, CPU performance advances are slowing as Moore’s law has ended. This has led to the adoption of accelerated computing with Nvidia GPUs and Mellanox’s intelligent networking solutions.

Datacenters in the future will be architected as giant compute engines with tens of thousands of compute nodes, designed holistically with their interconnects for optimal performance. 

An early innovator in high-performance interconnect technology, Mellanox pioneered the InfiniBand interconnect technology, which along with its high-speed Ethernet products is now used in over half of the world’s fastest supercomputers and in many leading hyperscale datacenters.

With Mellanox, Nvidia will optimise datacenter-scale workloads across the entire computing, networking and storage stack to achieve higher performance, greater utilisation and lower operating cost for customers.

“The emergence of AI and data science, as well as billions of simultaneous computer users, is fueling skyrocketing demand on the world’s datacenters,” said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of Nvidia. “Addressing this demand will require holistic architectures that connect vast numbers of fast computing nodes over intelligent networking fabrics to form a giant datacenter-scale compute engine.

“We’re excited to unite Nvidia’s accelerated computing platform with Mellanox’s world-renowned accelerated networking platform under one roof to create next-generation datacenter-scale computing solutions. I am particularly thrilled to work closely with the visionary leaders of Mellanox and their amazing people to invent the computers of tomorrow.”

“We share the same vision for accelerated computing as Nvidia,” said Eyal Waldman, founder and CEO of Mellanox. “Combining our two companies comes as a natural extension of our longstanding partnership and is a great fit given our common performance-driven cultures. This combination will foster the creation of powerful technology and fantastic opportunities for our people.”