Update 16h: Nvidia announces in a press release that the deal is done: it buys Mellanox for 6.9 billion dollars.
Nvidia buys all shares of Mellanox for 125 dollars per share in cash, which brings the valuation for deal to 6.9 billion dollars. “The acquisition brings together two of the most important companies in HPC,” says Nvidia. “Nvidia’s hardware and Mellanox interconnects can be found in 250 of the Top 500 systems of the world’s most powerful supercomputers. Every major cloud service provider is already a customer.”
The acquisition has been approved by the Boards of both Nvidia and Mellanox. The deal must be concluded by the end of 2019, as always subject to approval by the competent authorities. The shareholders of Mellanox still have to give their approval.
Original message:
Nvidia is said to be about to buy the Israeli Ethernet and infiniband specialty Mellanox. With that, Intel seems to be grabbing next to a deal, which it nevertheless wanted to close precisely in order to compete better with Nvidia.
According to anonymous sources, Nvidia has 7 billion dollars ready for a takeover of Mellanox. That’s a billion more than Intel suggested in January, and would be enough to make a deal. With this, Nvidia is shooting under the pigeons of Intel, but also assures itself of access to important interconnect technology.
Future technology
Israel-based Mellanox is a specialist in Infiniband interconnects. Fast interconnects are an essential part of HPC infrastructure, but they are also becoming increasingly important outside of it. The technology is the glue for systems where several processors work together as a whole, and can therefore also become important in self-propelled vehicles, for example.
Nvidia is increasingly positioning itself as a direct competitor to Intel. High performance computing is increasingly synonymous with parallel computing, and Nvidias gpus is a lot better at that than Intels cpus. Intel, which itself works on graphics cards, does not have an answer to this evolution at the moment.
Competition
The acquisition of Mellanox would certainly help Nvidia in the first instance for everything concerning data centres and supercomputers. Intel realizes that, too. That’s exactly why the processor builder Mellanox initially wanted to join the company. Intel itself has Omni-path interconnect technology, which is not substantially different from Infiniband. The January takeover bid therefore mainly served to keep Mellanox out of the hands of the competition. Everything now points to a failure to do so.
There is no official deal yet, although according to the sources it could be done soon. It is of course also possible that the takeover saga has a new episode.
Related: Intel seeks to strengthen data center position with acquisition Mellanox
This news article was automatically translated from Dutch to give Techzine.eu a head start. All news articles after September 1, 2019 are written in native English and NOT translated. All our background stories are written in native English as well. For more information read our launch article.