NVIDIA outbids Microsoft and Intel to buy datacenter chipmaker Mellanox for $6.9 billion
NVIDIA has announced that it plans to buy Israeli chipmaker Mellanox. Fending off competition from Microsoft and Intel, NVIDIA's bid of $6.9 billion was enough to secure the deal which is expected to be finalized by the end of the year.
As part of the agreement, NVIDIA will purchase all Mellanox shares for $125 each in cash. It sees the company expanding further into high-performance computing and supercomputers, and boosts its datacenter business.
NVIDIA's interest in Mellanox stemmed from its pioneering InfiniBand interconnect technology, used in many supercomputers and hyperscale datacenters. Together, the two companies say they will optimize datacenter-scale workloads across the entire computing, networking and storage stack to achieve higher performance, greater utilization and lower operating cost for customers.
Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA, said:
The emergence of AI and data science, as well as billions of simultaneous computer users, is fueling skyrocketing demand on the world’s datacenters. 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.
When the acquisition is complete, NVIDIA says that it will invest in local talent in Israel. Eyal Waldman, founder and CEO of Mellanox, said: "We share the same vision for accelerated computing as NVIDIA. 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".