NVIDIA is Acquiring Israeli Chipmaker Mellanox for $6.9B

Securing Datacenter Leadership

Israeli chipmaker Mellanox was the center of a bidding war over the past few weeks. The company is of course, a leading supplier of end-to-end Ethernet and InfiniBand intelligent interconnect solutions. So it is not surprising that the notable suitors for the bidding war rumoured to include Intel, NVIDIA, Xilinx and Broadcom.

Xilinx was originally the leader in the clubhouse. However, talks broke down after Mellanox raised the asking price to $6.7B. This is a 25% increase from the previous asking price. However, the company cites strong earnings as justification for the premium.

In a bid to shore up their datacenter business, NVIDIA offered $6.9B to finally secure the deal. Pursuant to the agreement, NVIDIA will acquire all of the issued and outstanding common shares. This is worth $125 per share in cash, representing a total enterprise value of approximately $6.9 billion.

What Does NVIDIA Think of the Acquisition?

““The emergence of AI and data science, as well as billions of simultaneous computer users, is fueling skyrocketing demand on the world’s datacenters,” says Jensen Huang, CEO of NVIDIA.

“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.” He adds that he is “particularly thrilled” to work closely with Mellanox to invent the computers of tomorrow.