HPC leaders unite as NVIDIA acquires Mellanox

NVIDIA and Mellanox have announced a definitive agreement under which NVIDIA will acquire Mellanox — an acquisition which will bring together 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 customers in the form of every major cloud service provider and computer maker. The agreement will see NVIDIA acquire all of the issued and outstanding common shares of Mellanox for US$125 per share in cash, representing a total enterprise value of approximately US$6.9 billion.

An early innovator in high-performance interconnect technology, Mellanox pioneered the InfiniBand interconnect technology, which along with its high-speed Ethernet products is now used in over half of the world’s fastest supercomputers and in many hyperscale data centres. With Mellanox, NVIDIA intends to optimise data centre-scale workloads across the entire computing, networking and storage stack to achieve higher performance, greater utilisation and lower operating cost for customers.

“The emergence of AI and data science, as well as billions of simultaneous computer users, is fuelling skyrocketing demand on the world’s data centres,” 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 data centre-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 data centre-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.”

The two 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 US Department of Energy. Many of the world’s top cloud service providers also use both NVIDIA GPUs and Mellanox interconnects.

“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 transaction has been approved by both companies’ boards of directors and is expected to close by the end of calendar year 2019, subject to regulatory approvals as well as other customary closing conditions, including the approval by Mellanox shareholders of the merger agreement. Once complete, NVIDIA intends to continue investing in local excellence and talent in Mellanox’s home country of Israel, which it describes as one of the world’s most important technology centres.

Image credit: ©stock.adobe.com/au/Worawut

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