Blackwell · Nvidia · Jensen Huang · Microsoft · The Register
Backbone of a beast, charting Nvidia's rise to networking titan
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How a $6.9B bet on Mellanox made Nvidia bigger than Cisco, and the world's most valuable company to boot.
Key facts
- GPUzilla's arrival as a networking power feels sudden, yet Jensen Huang started working towards this status in 2019 with the $6.9 billion acquisition of long-time networking partner Mellanox
- The second spread across 2024 and 2025, when Nvidia started selling Blackwell-generation GPUs and then started to ship them in large quantities
- How a $6.9B bet on Mellanox made Nvidia bigger than Cisco, and the world's most valuable company to boot
- Ben Mabey, CTO of pioneering AI and machine learning company Recursion, told The Reg Nvidia's integration schemes won him
Summary
In Q2, Nvidia's networking revenues topped $17.5 billion. GPUzilla's arrival as a networking power feels sudden, yet Jensen Huang started working towards this status in 2019 with the $6.9 billion acquisition of long-time networking partner Mellanox. At the time, Mellanox wasn't a big name in Ethernet switching. Buying Mellanox allowed Nvidia to reposition itself as a system builder, which means something different in the context of distributed compute.