The U.S.-based gaming and computer graphics firm Nvidia Corp. recently announced the acquisition of chip designer Mellanox Technologies Ltd for $6.8 billion to boost its data center and artificial intelligence business.
Along with providing gaming chips, Nvidia also offers processors to speed up artificial intelligence tasks like teaching servers that recognize images. The latest acquisition will unite NVIDIA’s computing platform and Mellanox’s end-to-end security solutions to become a major cloud service provider and computer maker.
Mellanox provides end-to-end connectivity solutions for servers that optimize data center performance. Founded in 1999, Israel and the U.S.-based company makes chips and other hardware for data center servers that power cloud computing.
Mellanox claims that it pioneered the InfiniBand interconnect technology and high-speed Ethernet products, which is now used in over half of the world’s fastest supercomputers and in various major data centers. Mellanox and NVIDIA will jointly improve the data center workloads across computing, networking, and storage to achieve higher performance and lower operating cost for customers.
Speaking on the new acquisition Jensen Huang, the founder, and CEO of NVIDIA, said, “The emergence of AI and data science, as well as billions of simultaneous computer users, is fueling skyrocketing demand on the world’s data centers. Addressing this demand will require holistic architectures that connect vast numbers of fast computing nodes over intelligent networking fabrics to form a giant data center-scale compute engine.”
“We share the same vision for accelerated computing at 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.”
