Thursday, March 28

NVIDIA beats Intel and Microsoft, acquire Mellanox for $6.9 Billion

Tech-based company NVIDIA will acquire Mellanox for approx $6.9 billion beating other tech giants like Microsoft and Intel in the acquisition race.

As per the report, NVIDIA will acquire all of the issued and outstanding common shares of Mellanox for $125 per share in cash. The deal will complete in the end of 2019.

In the media report, Microsoft was interested in the acquisition of Mellanox. Then Intel came into the picture, looking to buy it for around $6 billion but in the end, NVIDIA emerged on the last day offer higher bid a $7 billion+ all-cash and seal the deal.

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 data and compute intensity of modern workloads in AI, scientific computing and data analytics is growing exponentially and has put enormous performance demands on hyperscale and enterprise datacenters. 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 solution.

With Mellanox, NVIDIA will optimize datacenter-scale workloads across the entire computing, networking and storage stack to achieve higher performance, greater utilization and lower operating cost for customers.

“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.”

“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.”

The 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 U.S. 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.

Once the acquisition is complete, NVIDIA intends to continue investing in local excellence and talent in Israel, one of the world’s most important technology centers. Customer sales and support will not change as a result of this transaction.