News Nvidia to Acquire Networking Giant Mellanox for $6.9 Billion

[abryant]

Nvidia announced that it had reached an agreement with Mellanox to purchase the networking giant for $6.9 Billion. Read more here.

PAUL ALCORN
@PaulAlcorn
Paul Alcorn is a Senior Editor for Tom's Hardware US. He writes news and reviews on CPUs, storage and enterprise hardware.

 

[XD I know pc's]

cool i guess?

 

[hannibal]

Well They have to invest all the money From GPUs Somehow
Interesting to see how Nvidia is going to use this new brand.

 

[littleleo]

Are we going to see some special VGA & Network card variant? So Nvidia wants to sell Server NICs and consumer VGA cards. Server product sales is a longer and slower closing cycle that consumer products. This should be interesting, do you think Nvidia is still pissed at Intel for them refusing to let Nvidia make chipsets for Intel bases mothrboards?

 

[bit_user]

Well They have to invest all the money From GPUs Somehow

Yeah, amazingly, this looks to be an all-cash transaction (i.e. no stock-swaps)!

 

[bit_user]

Are we going to see some special VGA & Network card variant?

Probably not, but given how Intel integrated OmniPath directly into some of its Xeon CPUs, I guess we can't rule that out.

IMO, the clear intent is to provide a more complete, competitive offering to what Intel has. This gives Nvidia the GPUs and the networking stack. So, they just need to partner with a CPU vendor (probably ARM or POWER-based), to have a competing solution for datacenters and high-performance computing operators.

do you think Nvidia is still pissed at Intel for them refusing to let Nvidia make chipsets for Intel bases mothrboards?

No, I think they're moving on. The PC market is projected to continue shrinking, while datacenter is growing. Intel is increasingly a competitor (esp. when they introduce their own dGPUs), so Nvidia probably wouldn't want to keep enabling them, anyhow.

 

[80-watt Hamster]

This stuck out to me, and I'd love some clarification:

Mellanox recently came under fire from activist investor group Starboard Value, which criticized the company for passing over a buyout offer from Marvell. Mellanox appeased the group by appointing three new members to its 11-member board.

What is an "activist investor group", and why are they concerned about to whom a company decides to sell themselves?

Although, these might be bigger questions than can be addressed here...

 

[urbanman2004]

Good for you NVIDIA, another 'L' for Intel

 

[TJ Hooker]

This stuck out to me, and I'd love some clarification:



What is an "activist investor group", and why are they concerned about to whom a company decides to sell themselves?

Although, these might be bigger questions than can be addressed here...

If a company gets bought out that's usually a good thing for the shareholders of that company. If Mellanox passed up a good buyout opportunity the shareholders may have been upset. Starboard Value is hedge fund that owns a 10.7% stake in Mellanox, and clearly they weren't happy with the decision. I doubt it's that Starboard preferred they get bought by Marvell over Nvidia, they just want to get the best price (and maybe they didn't know the Nvidia deal was coming down the pike at that point).