Nvidia's Mellanox Deal Gains EU Stamp

Nvidia cleared another hurdle in its $6.9 billion quest to acquire chipmaker Mellanox after the European Commission gave its stamp of approval Thursday. Nvidia cleared another hurdle in its $6.9 billion quest to acquire chipmaker Mellanox after the European Commission gave its stamp of approval Thursday. “The commission concluded that the proposed acquisition would raise no competition concerns because the company’s mainly supply complementary products and they will not be able to leverage their respective positions into neighboring markets,” the European Commission noted in a statement. That approval clears yet another roadblock in the way of finalizing the merger. Nvidia has already received approval in the U.S., but the merger is still pending approval in China. A spokesperson from Nvidia’s corporate communications team declined to comment on the regulatory approval. In March, Nvidia announced plans to acquire Mellanox, which is perhaps best known for its high-speed networking interconnects. The deal will bolster Nvidia’s data center business and better position it to compete with rival Intel. Nvidia reportedly outbid Intel, Xilinx, and Microsoft to buy Mellanox, all of whom were looking to the networking interconnect company for its strength in artificial intelligence (AI), high-performance computing (high performance computing (HPC)), and other big data and analytics workloads. Speaking about the acquisition in March, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said his company would use Mellanox’s technology to optimize data center-scale workloads to achieve better performance and lower operating costs 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 data centers,” Huang said in a statement. “Addressing this demand will require holistic architectures that connect vast numbers of fast computing nodes over intelligent networking fabrics to form a giant data center-scale compute engine.” Mellanox and Nvidia have worked together on several occasions in the past few years, combining the graphics manufacturer’s graphics processing units (GPU) and Mellanox interconnects. Mellanox’s claims its InfiniBand interconnect technology, as well as its high-speed Ethernet products, are employed by more than half of the world’s fastest supercomputers and in many hyperscale data centers. And the two companies claim to count virtually every cloud provider as a customer.