It's official: NVIDIA completes its acquisition of Mellanox for US$7 billion

NVIDIA has today announced the completion of its acquisition of Mellanox Technologies, for a transaction value of US$7 billion.

The announcement comes over a year after the acquisition was announced in March 2019.

Mellanox is a supplier of end-to-end Ethernet and InfiniBand intelligent interconnect solutions and services for servers, storage, and hyper-converged infrastructure.

The acquisition is expected to be immediately accretive to NVIDIA's non-GAAP gross margin, non-GAAP EPS and free cash flow, inclusive of incremental interest expense related to NVIDIA's recent issuance of US$5 billion of notes.

The acquisition combines NVIDIA's computing expertise with Mellanox's networking technology, and the two companies hope the move will enable customers to achieve higher performance, greater utilisation of computing resources and lower operating costs.

"The expanding use of artificial intelligence (AI) and data science is reshaping computing and data center architectures," says NVIDIA founder and chief executive officer Jensen Huang.

"With Mellanox, the new NVIDIA has end-to-end technologies from AI computing to networking, full-stack offerings from processors to software, and significant scale to advance next-generation data centers.

"Our combined expertise, supported by a rich ecosystem of partners, will meet the challenge of surging global demand for consumer internet services, and the application of AI and accelerated data science from cloud to edge to robotics."

Mellanox founder and chief executive officer Eyal Waldman says the collaboration between the two companies highlights the strategic advantage of utilising products from both arsenals to get a leg up on the industry.

"This is a powerful, complementary combination of cultures, technology and ambitions. Our people are enormously enthusiastic about the many opportunities ahead," says Waldman.

"As Mellanox steps into the next exciting phase of its journey, we will continue to offer cutting-edge solutions and innovative products to our customers and partners.

"We look forward to bringing NVIDIA products and solutions into our markets, and to bringing Mellanox products and solutions into NVIDIA's markets.

"Together, our technologies will provide leading solutions into compute and storage platforms wherever they are required."

The finalisation of the acquisition comes a week after reports that major game publishers, including Warner Brothers Interactive Entertainment, XBOX Game Studios, Codemasters, and Klei Entertainment, were pulling their games from NVIDIA's new GeForce NOW video game library.

While no explicit reason was given by NVIDIA to explain the reason for the publishers' decisions to pull out, the company said it hopes the publishers will return 'in the future'.