Which semiconductor company did NVIDIA acquire in 2020 for approximately $7 billion?

NVIDIA acquired Mellanox Technologies in 2020 for approximately $7 billion.

NVIDIA announced the agreement in March 2019 and completed it in April 2020 after receiving regulatory approvals. Mellanox supplied high-performance networking products, including InfiniBand and Ethernet technologies used in data centers and supercomputers.

The acquisition expanded NVIDIA beyond its traditional reputation for graphics-processing units. Fast networking is important because large computing systems divide workloads among many processors, and those processors must exchange data quickly. Mellanox’s interconnect expertise complemented NVIDIA’s accelerator hardware.

The transaction is sometimes confused with NVIDIA’s proposed acquisition of Arm Holdings. NVIDIA announced that proposed Arm deal in 2020, but it was abandoned in 2022 after regulatory opposition and other challenges. Mellanox, by contrast, became part of NVIDIA successfully.