Nvidia’s Mellanox deal helps it become a major networking supplier
Nvidia has grown from a graphics and AI hardware leader into a major networking supplier, with quarterly networking revenue exceeding Cisco’s total revenue. The shift reflects a strategy begun in 2019, when Nvidia bought Mellanox for $6.9 billion to combine computing and networking for large AI clusters.
Mellanox brought InfiniBand switches and ConnectX network cards, which Nvidia integrated with its GPUs and software. Drug-discovery company Recursion said this approach made it easier to optimise and troubleshoot a cluster of about 300 A100 accelerators, processing datasets larger than 50 petabytes. The article says Nvidia’s networking revenue has risen steadily since the acquisition, though the supplied text cuts off before detailing two later surges.
In short
- Nvidia’s networking revenue topped $17.5 billion in Q2.
- Its Mellanox acquisition helped unite GPUs and network equipment.
- Recursion used the integrated system for large-scale biological data.
Explained simply
Nvidia is best known for making graphics processors, or GPUs, which are also used to run artificial intelligence systems. Large AI projects link many GPUs together so they can share data and work on tasks in parallel; the equipment that connects them is called networking hardware.
In 2019, Nvidia bought Mellanox, a company that made network switches and cards for servers. Nvidia combined those products with its GPUs and software, aiming to make it easier for customers to build and manage large computing clusters.
One example is Recursion, a drug-discovery company that said the combined products helped it run and troubleshoot a cluster of about 300 Nvidia accelerators. The shift matters because networking has become a substantial part of Nvidia’s business, alongside the chips for which it was already known.
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Originally published by The Register as “Backbone of a beast – charting Nvidia’s rise to networking titan”.