Santa Clara, California-based American technology company Nvidia Corporation on Monday announced the purchase of Mellanox Technologies, an Israeli multinational supplier of computer networking products using InfiniBand and Ethernet technology, for about $6.9 billion.
According to a press release issued by Nvidia, “the acquisition will unite two of the world’s leading companies in high performance computing (HPC). Together, NVIDIA’s computing platform and Mellanox’s interconnects power over 250 of the world’s TOP500 supercomputers and have as customers every major cloud service provider and computer maker.”
The two companies have a long history of collaboration and joint innovation, reflected in their recent contributions in building the world’s two fastest supercomputers, Sierra and Summit, operated by the US Department of Energy. Many of the world’s top cloud service providers also use both NVIDIA GPUs and Mellanox interconnects. NVIDIA and Mellanox share a common performance-centric culture that will enable seamless integration.
Mellanox was founded in 1999 in the city of Yokne’am, at the foot of the Carmel mountain ridge, by former Israeli executives of Intel Corporation and Galileo Technology Eyal Waldman, Shai Cohen, Roni Ashuri, Michael Kagan, Evelyn Landman, Eitan Zahavi, Shimon Rottemberg, Udi Katz and Alon Webman.
The company went public in 2007, with an initial public offering on NASDAQ that raised $102 million, and valued the company at over half a billion dollars. By 2009, the company had evolved from an integrated circuit (chip) manufacturer into a producer of complete end-to-end systems. Mellanox’s investment fund was publicly launched in 2014.
Mellanox is a design-only company, outsourcing the manufacture of its current generation of chips to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corp.
Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA said in a statement: “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.”
Eyal Waldman, founder and CEO of Mellanox, said in a statement, “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.”