NVIDIA (Santa Clara, CA) and Mellanox (Sunnyvale, CA) announced that the companies have reached a definitive agreement under which NVIDIA will acquire Mellanox. Pursuant to the agreement, NVIDIA will acquire the issued and outstanding common shares of Mellanox for $125 per share in cash, representing a total value of approximately $6.9 billion.
The acquisition will unite the high-performance computing (HPC) companies; NVIDIA's computing platform and Mellanox's interconnects power more than 250 of the world’s TOP500 supercomputers. The data and compute intensity of modern workloads in AI, scientific computing and data analytics is growing exponentially and has put enormous performance demands on hyperscale and enterprise datacenters. While computing demand is surging, CPU performance advances are slowing as Moore's law has ended. This has led to the adoption of accelerated computing with NVIDIA GPUs and Mellanox's intelligent networking solutions.
Datacenters in the future will be architected as giant compute engines with tens of thousands of compute nodes, designed holistically with their interconnects for optimal performance. Mellanox pioneered the InfiniBand interconnect technology, which along with its high-speed Ethernet products is now used in over half of the world's fastest supercomputers and in many leading hyperscale datacenters.
With Mellanox, NVIDIA will optimize datacenter-scale workloads across the entire computing, networking and storage stack to achieve higher performance, greater utilization and lower operating cost for customers.
"The emergence of AI and data science, as well as billions of simultaneous computer users, is fueling skyrocketing demand on the world's datacenters," said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA. "Addressing this demand will require holistic architectures that connect vast numbers of fast computing nodes over intelligent networking fabrics to form a giant datacenter-scale compute engine."
The companies have a long history of collaboration and joint innovation, reflected in their recent contributions in building the world's two fastest supercomputers, Sierra and Summit, operated by the U.S. Department of Energy. Many of the world’s top cloud service providers also use both NVIDIA GPUs and Mellanox interconnects. NVIDIA and Mellanox share a common performance-centric culture that will enable seamless integration.
Post close, the transaction is expected to be immediately accretive to NVIDIA's non-GAAP gross margin, non-GAAP earnings per share, and free cash flow. NVIDIA intends to fund the acquisition through cash on its balance sheet. In addition, there is no change to its previously announced capital return program for the rest of fiscal 2020. The transaction has been approved by both companies’ boards of directors and is expected to close by the end of calendar year 2019, subject to regulatory approvals as well as other customary closing conditions, including the approval by Mellanox shareholders of the merger agreement.
SOURCE: Nvidia; https://nvidianews.nvidia.com/news/nvidia-to-acquire-mellanox-for-6-9-billion
