NVIDIA to Acquire Mellanox for $6.9 Billion

NVIDIA and Mellanox report that the companies have reached a definitive agreement under which NVIDIA will acquire Mellanox. Pursuant to the agreement, NVIDIA will acquire all of the issued and outstanding common shares of Mellanox for $125 per share in cash, representing a total enterprise value of approximately $6.9 billion. Once complete, the combination is expected to be immediately accretive to NVIDIA’s non-GAAP gross margin, non-GAAP earnings per share and free cash flow.

The acquisition will unite the two known companies in high-performance computing (HPC). Together, NVIDIA’s computing platform and Mellanox’s interconnects power over 250 of the world’s TOP500 supercomputers and have as customers every major cloud service provider and computer maker, according to the comanies.

An early creator of high-performance interconnect technology, 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 hyperscale datacenters.

With Mellanox, NVIDIA will optimize datacenter-scale workloads across the entire computing, networking and storage stack to achieve higher performance, greater use 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,” says 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.

“We share the same vision for accelerated computing as NVIDIA,” says Eyal Waldman, founder and CEO of Mellanox. “Combining our two companies comes as a natural extension of our longstanding partnership and is a great fit given our common performance-driven cultures. This combination will foster the creation of powerful technology and fantastic opportunities for our people.”

The companies have a long history of collaboration and joint innovation, reflected in their recent contributions in building two supercomputers, Sierra and Summit, operated by the U.S. Department of Energy. Many of the world’s cloud service providers also use both NVIDIA GPUs and Mellanox interconnects. NVIDIA and Mellanox share a common performance-centric culture that will enable integration.

Once the combination is complete, NVIDIA intends to continue investing in talent in Israel. Customer sales and support will not change as a result of this transaction.

Additional Transaction Details

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.

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Sources: Press materials received from the company and additional information gleaned from the company’s website.

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