Nvidia to buy Israeli chipmaker Mellanox for $6.9bn in data centre push

Nvidia Corporation has announced that it will acquire Israeli chip designer Mellanox Technologies in a deal worth around $6.9bn.

Mellanox makes chips and other hardware for data centre servers that power cloud computing.

The deal is Nvidia’s biggest-ever acquisition and is expected to boost its business of making chips for data centres.

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In a statement, the companies said that the deal will “unite two of the world’s leading companies in high performance computing (HPC)”.

“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.”

Today, Nvidia’s computing platform and Mellanox’s interconnects power over 250 of the world’s TOP50) supercomputers.

“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’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.”

Following the acquisition, NVIDIA plans to invest in local excellent and talent in Israel.