Nvidia Completes $7 Billion Acquisition Of Israel’s Mellanox Technologies

Nvidia announced on Monday the completion of its acquisition of Israel’s Mellanox Technologies, a leading supplier of end-to-end Ethernet and InfiniBand smart interconnect solutions for data servers and storage systems, for a transaction value of $7 billion.

The acquisition was first announced in March 2019 pending regulatory approval. Nvidia received final approval to proceed from all necessary authorities including in the US, China, and the EU earlier this month.

Nvidia invented the graphics processing unit (GPU) in 1999, redefining modern computer graphics and sparking the growth of the PC gaming market. In recent years, it has become a leader in artificial intelligence computing with an eye toward autonomous vehicles and robotics.

Mellanox’s solutions include adapters, switches, software and silicon that accelerate application runtime and maximize business results for a wide range of markets including high-performance computing, enterprise data centers, Web 2.0, cloud, storage, and financial services. Many of the world’s top cloud service providers also use Mellanox interconnects as well as Nvidia GPUs.

“Combining Nvidia’s leading computing expertise with Mellanox’s high-performance networking technology, the move will enable customers to achieve higher performance, greater utilization of computing resources, and lower operating costs,” Nvidia said in a statement.

Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of Nvidia, said: “The expanding use of AI and data science is reshaping computing and data center architectures. 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,” he added.

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,” added Waldman.

This is Waldman’s second exit in two decades. He sold chip company Galileo, which he co-founded, to Marvell in 2000 for $2.7 billion.

Waldman said last year that Mellanox will continue manufacturing in Israel and will actually grow its manpower to scale its offerings. He indicated that the idea was to keep Mellanox as an “entity” operating out of Israel.