NVIDIA has announced that it has completed its acquisition of Mellanox Technologies – a leading supplier of networking and interconnect solutions – for $7 billion in cash, finalizing a deal that was agreed upon in March 2019 to improve the companies’ prospects in the high-performance computing (HPC) market. Now that the ink has cleared, NVIDIA can capitalize on Mellanox’s biggest IPs, which include InfiniBand, the speedy networking communications standard that’s utilized in over half of the world’s fastest supercomputers.
“The expanding use of AI and data science is reshaping computing and data center architectures,” said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA. “With Mellanox, the new NVIDIA has end-to-end technologies from AI computing to networking, full-stack offerings from processors to software, and significant scale to advance next-generation data centers. Our combined expertise, supported by a rich ecosystem of partners, will meet the challenge of surging global demand for consumer internet services, and the application of AI and accelerated data science from cloud to edge to robotics.”
Eyal Waldman, founder and CEO of Mellanox, said: “This is a powerful, complementary combination of cultures, technology and ambitions. Our people are enormously enthusiastic about the many opportunities ahead. As Mellanox steps into the next exciting phase of its journey, we will continue to offer cutting-edge solutions and innovative products to our customers and partners. We look forward to bringing NVIDIA products and solutions into our markets, and to bringing Mellanox products and solutions into NVIDIA’s markets. Together, our technologies will provide leading solutions into compute and storage platforms wherever they are required.”
The collaboration effectively fleshes out NVIDIA’s HPC stack, which already comprised various processing and storage technologies. Mellanox’s networking platform will allow for even higher performance, greater utilization, and lower operating cost for customers.