Nvidia Acquires Mellanox for $6.9 Billion – Update

Nvidia is rumored to have acquired the American company Mellanox Technologies, manufacturer of InfiniBand and Ethernet networking equipment. Reportedly, Nvidia has bid higher than Intel.

The acquisition amount would be $7 billion. This would be the largest acquisition in Nvidia’s history. The rumor comes from Reuters, which relies on a source who claims to be familiar with the plans. Nvidia and Mellanox could announce the acquisition on Monday.

Mellanox Technologies is a company that makes adapters, switches, and chips for InfiniBand and Ethernet networking equipment. The company’s products are used for supercomputers, data centers, enterprise servers and storage products. Mellanox’s InfiniBand interconnect is used, among other things, for Nvidia’s GPUDirect, for direct access to GPU memory in clusters, for example.

Nvidia’s data center division has become increasingly important to Nvidia in recent years. In the past quarter, the company raised $679 million from its data center products, such as Tesla accelerators. Gaming is still Nvidia’s biggest component. That division achieved a turnover of $954 million, but Nvidia wants to become less dependent on it.

Intel has had its own Omni-path interconnects since 2015 to compete with Mellanox, but that technology seems to be struggling to gain a foothold. It is not known how much Intel would have bid on Mellanox.

Update, 12:51 PM: Nvidia has announced it is acquiring Mellanox for $6.9 billion. The title of the article has been adjusted accordingly.