NVIDIA and Mellanox have reached a definitive agreement under which NVIDIA will acquire Mellanox. Pursuant to the agreement, NVIDIA will acquire all of the issued and outstanding common shares of Mellanox for $125 per share in cash, representing a total enterprise value of approximately $6.9 billion.
Once complete, the combination is expected to be immediately accretive to NVIDIA’s non-GAAP gross margin, non-GAAP earnings per share and free cash flow.
The acquisition will unite 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 TOP 500 supercomputers and have as customers every major cloud service provider and computer maker.
The data and compute intensity of modern workloads in AI, scientific computing and data analytics is growing exponentially and has put enormous performance demands on hyperscale and enterprise datacenters.
While computing demand is surging, CPU performance advances are slowing as Moore’s law has ended. This has led to the adoption of accelerated computing with NVIDIA GPUs and Mellanox’s intelligent networking solutions.
Datacenters in the future will be architected as giant compute engines with tens of thousands of compute nodes, designed holistically with their interconnects for optimal performance.
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 leading hyperscale datacenters.
With Mellanox, NVIDIA will optimize datacenter-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 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.”
To casual observers, it may seem odd that a graphics chip maker made its biggest investment to date on a company that produces data center technologies, but the acquisition is aligned with NVIDIA’s long-term trajectory.
According to NVIDIA, there is an “enormous market opportunity” for computing and high-speed networking, with the total addressable market being worth $60 billion or more by 2023.
The 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 U.S. Department of Energy.
Many of the world’s top cloud service providers also use both NVIDIA GPUs and Mellanox interconnects. NVIDIA and Mellanox share a common performance-centric culture that will enable seamless integration.
“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.”
Once the combination is complete, NVIDIA intends to continue investing in local excellence and talent in Israel, one of the world’s most important technology centers. Customer sales and support will not change as a result of this transaction.
NVIDIA will conduct a webcast at 5:30 a.m. PT today to discuss the transaction. The webcast and a copy of the presentation materials can be found on NVIDIA’s Investor Relations website here. A webcast replay and a copy of the webcast presentation materials will also be available here.
