Nvidia Bids for Israeli Chip Firm Mellanox: report
Nvidia and Intel are reportedly compete for Israeli chip designer Mellanox, with Nvidia to have already submitted an offer.
According to the Calcalist financial news website, Nvidia has already offered $6 billion for the Israeli company. It cited estimates that Nvidia would pay at least 10 percent more than the price offered by Intel.
Nvidia's advantage is that it would have a greater chance of obtaining U.S. and Chinese regulatory approval as Intel and Mellanox control the market for InfiniBand technology, a networking communications standard commonly used in supercomputers, Calcalist said.
Seperately, Bloomberg also reported that Nvidia is nearing an agreement to buy Mellanox.
Representatives for Nvidia, Mellanox and Intel declined to comment.
Mellanox makes chips and other hardware for data center servers that power cloud computing. The company's technology is useful in transferring information from one component to another both within and between computers. The rate at which chips direct that traffic has become increasingly important as corporate computer networks and cloud service providers try to make sense of the growing flood of data being generated.
Nvidia has been pushing its technology into new areas, arguing that it has the best solution to the tougher requirements of processing data related to artificial intelligence. Nvidia's unit that serves the data center market has tripled sales in the last three years.