Nvidia completes acquisition of Mellanox Technologies

Global chipmaker and artificial intelligence (AI) giant Nvidia has announced that it has completed the acquisition of Mellanox Technologies for a transaction value of $7 billion.

The Santa Clara, California-based company said in a statement that the acquisition was announced on March 11, 2019 will enable customers to enhance performance and lower operating costs.

Sunnyvale, California and Tokneam, Israel based Mellanox Technologies provides end-to-end connectivity solutions for servers and storage that optimises data centre performance.

It was founded by Evelyn Landman, Eyal Waldman, Roni Ashuri, Shai Cohen back in 1999.

The combined company will provide expertise in compute and networking technologies for high-performance computing, the company said in a statement.

“The expanding use of artificial intelligence (AI) and data science is reshaping computing and data centre architectures. With Mellanox, the new NVIDIA has end-to-end technologies from AI computing to networking, full-stack offerings from processors to software, and significant scale to advance next-generation data centres," Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of Nvidia said. 

Huang believes their combined expertise supported by partners will challenge surging global demand for consumer internet services, and the application of AI and accelerated data science from cloud to edge to robotics.

“We look forward to bringing Nvidia products and solutions into our markets, and to bringing Mellanox products and solutions into Nvidia’s markets. Together, our technologies will provide leading solutions into compute and storage platforms wherever they are required.” Eyal Waldman, founder and CEO of Mellanox said.

Recently, Nvidia made its genome-sequencing software Parabricks free for researchers fighting the Covid-19 virus. The company said that it will be available for 90 days at no cost.

The company also expanded its free virtual graphic processing unit (vGPU) software evaluation from 128 licenses to 500 for 90 days, to support people working remotely during the Covid-19 outbreak.