Nvidia → Mellanox Technologies
Nvidia's $6.9bn cash purchase of Mellanox, the Israeli pioneer of InfiniBand interconnects, agreed in March 2019 and completed in April 2020, gave a graphics-chip company the networking it needed to sell computing at the scale of a whole data centre a few years before the AI boom.
An all-cash purchase of the high-performance interconnect maker that became the basis of Nvidia's data centre networking business.
- Value
- $6.9B
- Announced
- March 2019
- Completed
- April 2020
- Sector
- Technology
- Deal type
- acquisition
- Acquirer
- Nvidia (United States)
- Target
- Mellanox Technologies (Israel)
Why it mattered
Mellanox was founded in 1999 in Yokneam, Israel, by former Intel and Galileo Technology executives, and its InfiniBand and high-speed Ethernet products connected more than half of the world's fastest supercomputers. It was also a company in play: the activist Starboard Value took a 10.7% stake in 2017 and won board seats in 2018, and Intel, Xilinx and Microsoft were all interested in buying it.
Nvidia agreed on 11 March 2019 to pay $125 a share in cash, an enterprise value of about $6.9bn, from its own balance sheet. Nvidia argued that future data centres would be "giant compute engines with tens of thousands of compute nodes", designed together with the interconnects between them; the two companies' products already ran in more than 250 of the TOP500 supercomputers. The deal was expected to close by the end of 2019; it completed on 27 April 2020, after approval by competition authorities in the United States, the European Union and China, at a transaction value of $7bn.
What it left behind
Nvidia dropped the Mellanox name and folded it into its networking business; its BlueField data processing units descend from the acquisition, and Nvidia says the purchase enabled its platforms to work at data-centre scale. In the year to January 2026 Nvidia's data-centre networking revenue — which now also includes its own NVLink fabric — was $31.4bn, up from $13bn a year earlier and more than four times the price paid for Mellanox. The Chinese approval carried commitments that later became a lever: on 15 September 2025 China's competition regulator published a preliminary finding that Nvidia, by complying with US export controls, had broken the terms of that approval, and Nvidia's August 2026 quarterly report still listed possible penalties among its risks. Conditions accepted to clear a merger can outlast the deal by years and turn into leverage in unrelated disputes, so they deserve to be priced as a long-dated liability.