Just over a 12 months in the past, NVIDIA introduced its intentions to accumulate Mellanox, a number one datacenter networking and interconnect supplier. And, after going via some extended regulatory hurdles, together with approval by the Chinese authorities in addition to a ready interval within the United States, NVIDIA has now closed on the deal as of this morning. All informed, NVIDIA is pricing the ultimate acquisition at a cool 7 billion {dollars}, all in money.
Overall, within the intervening 12 months, NVIDIA’s reasoning for buying the networking supplier has not modified: the corporate believes {that a} extra vertically built-in product stack that features high-speed networking {hardware} will permit them to additional develop their enterprise, particularly as GPU-powered supercomputers and different HPC clusters get extra outstanding. To that finish, it’s onerous to get extra outstanding than Mellanox, whose Ethernet and Infiniband gear is utilized in over half of the TOP500-listed supercomputers on this planet, in addition to numerous datacenters.
Ultimately, buying the corporate not solely provides NVIDIA modern networking merchandise and IP, however it can additionally permit them to take advantage of the benefits of having the ability to develop in-house the high-performance interconnects wanted to permit their very own high-performance compute merchandise to higher scale. NVIDIA already has important dealings with Mellanox, as the corporate’s DGX-2 programs incorporate Mellanox’s controllers for multi-node scaling. As effectively, Mellanox’s {hardware} is utilized in each the Summit and Sierra supercomputers, each of that are additionally powered by NVIDIA GPUs. So this acquisition is in lots of respects simply the newest enlargement in NVIDIA’s ongoing efforts to develop their datacenter presence.
