NVIDIA completed its $7 billion acquisition of Mellanox Technologies. The deal was originally announced on March 11, 2019.
NVIDIA says that by combining its computing expertise with Mellanox’s high-performance networking technology, data center customers will achieve higher performance, greater utilization of computing resources and lower operating costs.
“The expanding use of AI and data science is reshaping computing and data center architectures,” said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA. “With Mellanox, the new NVIDIA has end-to-end technologies from AI computing to networking, full-stack offerings from processors to software, and significant scale to advance next-generation data centers. Our combined expertise, supported by a rich ecosystem of partners, will meet the challenge of surging global demand for consumer internet services, and the application of AI and accelerated data science from cloud to edge to robotics.”
Eyal Waldman, founder and CEO of Mellanox, said: “This is a powerful, complementary combination of cultures, technology and ambitions. Our people are enormously enthusiastic about the many opportunities ahead. As Mellanox steps into the next exciting phase of its journey, we will continue to offer cutting-edge solutions and innovative products to our customers and partners. We look forward to bringing NVIDIA products and solutions into our markets, and to bringing Mellanox products and solutions into NVIDIA’s markets. Together, our technologies will provide leading solutions into compute and storage platforms wherever they are required.”
The acquisition is expected to be immediately accretive to NVIDIA’s non-GAAP gross margin, non-GAAP EPS and free cash flow, inclusive of incremental interest expense related to NVIDIA’s recent issuance of $5 billion of notes.
With Mellanox, NVIDIA targets full compute/network/storage stack
The merger targets data centers in general and the high-performance computing (HPC) market in particular. 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. 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.
NVIDIA said the acquired assets enables it to data center-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.“We share the same vision for accelerated computing as NVIDIA,” said 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.”
NVIDIA also promised to continue investing in Israel, where Mellanox is based.
The companies expect to close the deal by the end of 2019.
NVIDIA cites increasing GPUdemand from data centers and gaming
GAAP earnings per diluted share for the quarter were $1.53, up 66 percent from $0.92 a year ago, and up 6 percent from $1.45 in the previous quarter. Non-GAAP earnings per diluted share were $1.89, up 136 percent from $0.80 a year earlier, and up 6 percent from $1.78 in the previous quarter.
For fiscal 2020, revenue was $10.92 billion, down 7 percent from $11.72 billion a year earlier. GAAP earnings per diluted share were $4.52, down 32 percent from $6.63 a year earlier. Non-GAAP earnings per diluted share were $5.79, down 13 percent from $6.64 a year earlier.
“Adoption of NVIDIA accelerated computing drove excellent results, with record data center revenue,” said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA. “Our initiatives are achieving great success.
“NVIDIA RTX ray tracing is reinventing computer graphics, driving powerful adoption across gaming, VR and design markets, while opening new opportunities in rendering and cloud gaming. NVIDIA AI is enabling breakthroughs in language understanding, conversational AI and recommendation engines ― the core algorithms that power the internet today. And new NVIDIA computing applications in 5G, genomics, robotics and autonomous vehicles enable us to continue important work that has great impact."
Mellanox hits revenue of $429 million, up 40% yoy
GAAP gross margins were 66.8%, compared to 64.6% in the first quarter of 2019.
“Mellanox delivered record revenue and operating income in the first quarter of 2020. All our major product lines continued to grow. We are pleased to be shipping end-to-end solutions at speeds of 200 gigabits per second (Gbps) for both InfiniBand and Ethernet. In addition, we are shipping 400 Gbps Ethernet switches,” said Eyal Waldman, President and CEO of Mellanox Technologies.“Sales of Ethernet adapter products increased 112% year-over-year. We expect our new ConnectX-6 Dx adapters and Bluefield-2 I/O Processing Units (IPUs), the latest additions to our industry-leading family of Smart NICs, to bring unprecedented security and co-processing capabilities to enterprise and cloud data centers. These capabilities will be further strengthened by our recent acquisition of Titan IC, the leading developer of network intelligence and security technology to accelerate search and big data analytics across a broad range of applications in data centers worldwide. The product line revenue of our Spectrum ASIC based Ethernet switch business grew 66% year-over-year. We recently began shipping Spectrum-3 based switches, the world’s first 12.8 Tbps networking platforms optimized for cloud, storage, and artificial intelligence,” continued Waldman.
“We are experiencing very strong adoption of InfiniBand for hyperscale artificial intelligence and cloud environments, resulting in tens of thousands of compute nodes connected with InfiniBand, which demonstrates the superior performance and scalability of InfiniBand. We saw 27% year-over-year growth in InfiniBand, led by strong demand for our HDR 200 gigabit solutions. HDR InfiniBand has been selected to interconnect national Exascale programs, large scale artificial intelligence and cloud platforms, and enterprise compute and storage infrastructures. We are proud that our InfiniBand technology is being utilized by many of the supercomputers in the Covid-19 High-Performance Computing Consortium, which is helping to aggregate computing capabilities for researchers to execute complex computations to help fight the novel Corona virus,” continued Waldman. “We are excited to participate in such important global initiatives through the adoption of our industry-leading adapters, switches, cables, and software, while also delivering strong financial performance for the first quarter of 2020.”
