Nvidia outbids Microsoft, Intel to acquire chipmaker Mellanox for $6.9 billion

Nvidia has come out on top in a bidding war for chipmaker Mellanox.

In a press release on Monday, Nvidia announced its $6.9 billion acquisition of Mellanox, an Israel and California-based networking technology and supercomputer chipmaker. The all-cash acquisition is the largest ever for Nvidia, a company best known for its graphics processors for high-performance gaming.

Mellanox’s focus is on technology for networking and data storage. The company creates InfiniBand and Ethernet products for use in the cloud and data centers as well as in the artificial intelligence sector. It boasts that its technology is used in half of the top 500 most powerful supercomputers.

“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 Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang in a statement. “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.”

Some of the industry’s biggest players were interested in acquiring Mellanox and had submitted offers before Nvidia swooped in to make a bid over the last day. Microsoft, Intel, Xilinx, and Broadcom had all emerged as potential buyers before the Nvidia deal was announced.

Microsoft is one of Mellanox’s biggest customers, as it uses the company’s products for its Azure cloud.

In Intel’s case, the tech giant was likely looking to “corner the market” with its bid as Engadget points out. The company develops a number of products which overlap with Mellanox’s offerings. Intel reportedly offered $6 billion for the chipmaker.

Nvidia ended up outbidding the other suitors, paying $125 per share.

“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,” said Huang.

With the acquisition, the combination of Nvidia and Mellanox will have “every major cloud service provider and computer maker” as a customer.