Nvidia is acquiring the Israel-based networking firm Mellanox for around $6.9 billion in cash.
Mellanox is a prominent supplier of end-to-end Ethernet and InfiniBand smart interconnect solutions and services for servers and storage. These solutions help companies to boost datacenter efficiency by optimizing throughput and latency, providing data faster to applications, and unlocking system performance capability.
Nvidia is a leading company in the world in high-performance computing (HPC), whereas Mellanox is an early innovator in high-performance interconnect technology. The acquisition will combine the expertise of Nvidia and Mellanox.
“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,” said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA.
More than half of the world’s Top 500 supercomputers and leading hyperscale datacenters are using Nvidia’s computing platform and Mellanox’s interconnects technology.
With the acquisition of Mellanox, Nvidia will optimize datacenter-scale workloads across the entire computing, networking and storage stack, the companies said. This will help customers to achieve higher performance, greater utilization and lower operating cost.
“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,” added Jensen Huang.
Nvidia and Mellanox have been working closely for a while now. They jointly contributed in the development of world’s two fastest supercomputers—Sierra and Summit.
Following the completion of acquisition, Nvidia will continue to invest in local excellence and talent in Israel. No changes will be made to customer sales and support.
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“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.”
Image source: Nvidia
