Nvidia acquired Mellanox Technologies in 2020 for approximately $6.9 billion.
Mellanox was founded in 1999 by Eyal Waldman and Alon Webman. The company developed high-speed interconnect products, including InfiniBand and Ethernet technologies used to connect servers and storage systems in data centers. These connections are especially important in high-performance computing, where many processors must exchange data quickly.
Nvidia announced its agreement to buy Mellanox in March 2019, and the acquisition closed in April 2020. Nvidia paid $125 per share in cash. The deal expanded Nvidia beyond graphics processors and strengthened its position in data-center networking, an area increasingly important for artificial intelligence and supercomputing.
Mellanox is sometimes confused with Arm, the British chip-architecture company Nvidia agreed to acquire later but ultimately did not complete. Nvidia’s Mellanox purchase was completed, while the proposed Arm transaction was terminated in 2022 after regulatory opposition and other challenges.