Nvidia Aims for Data Center With $6.9 Billion Mellanox Deal

Nvidia officials are taking a significant step in growing the GPU maker’s presence in the rapidly changing data center space and making it a more formidable competitor with Intel with their planned $6.9 billion acquisition of networking vendor Mellanox Technologies.The company announced the deal March 11, following several days of speculation that Nvidia was interested in buying Mellanox, which had also been getting acquisition attention from Intel, with reports circulating that Intel several months ago had offer $6 billion. Another chip maker, Xilinx, also was among the bidders. The deal is the largest in Nvidia’s history. Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang said during a conference call to announce the deal that having Mellanox in the fold will increase his company’s capabilities and status in a broad range of data center scenarios, from enterprise and high-performance computing (HPC) environments to cloud and hyperscale infrastructures.