NVIDIA to Acquire Mellanox for $6.9 Billion

11 March, 2019

Together with Mellanox, NVIDIA plans to optimize datacenter-scale workloads across the entire computing, networking and storage stack

Mellanox CEO Eyal Waldman

NVIDIA and Mellanox have reached a definitive merger agreement, following what seemed as a competition between Xilinx, Intel and Nvidia. Under the agreement, NVIDIA will acquire all of the issued and outstanding common shares of Mellanox for $125 per share in cash, representing a total enterprise value of approximately $6.9 billion. Once the combination is complete, NVIDIA intends to continue investing in Israel.

The transaction has been approved by both companies’ boards of directors and is expected to close by the end of 2019, subject to regulatory and Mellanox shareholders approvals. NVIDIA intends to fund the acquisition through cash on its balance sheet. Nvidia is looking a new entrance into the data center markets, with a combination of powerful processor and the fast InfiniBand  and high-speed Ethernet interconnect technologies of 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,” said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA. “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.”

The two companies have already cooperated in the past: NVIDIA’s computing platform and Mellanox’s interconnects power over 250 of the world’s TOP500 supercomputers,  and they collaborated in building the world’s two fastest supercomputers, Sierra and Summit, operated by the U.S. Department of Energy. Nvidia said that while computing demand is surging, CPU performance advances are slowing as Moore’s law has ended. “This has led to the adoption of accelerated computing with NVIDIA GPUs and Mellanox’s intelligent networking solutions.”

Together with Mellanox, NVIDIA plans to optimize datacenter-scale workloads across the entire computing, networking and storage stack. Eyal Waldman, founder and CEO of Mellanox (photo above), added: “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.”

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