Report: after Intel reportedly offered $6B for Mellanox in January, Nvidia has now submitted a competing bid for the Israeli chip designer
TEL AVIV (Reuters) - Nvidia Corp has submitted an offer to buy Israeli chip designer Mellanox, the Calcalist financial news website said on Sunday.
Context & Ripple Effects
This is the middle beat of a two-month bidding contest. In late January, days after Intel announced an expansion of its Israel chip plant, sources put Intel's Mellanox offer at $5.5B; by this report it had reportedly risen to $6B, and Calcalist says Nvidia has now countered. The prize is Mellanox's data-center server networking hardware — exactly the interconnect layer a GPU vendor needs to own.
First-order effects
- Mellanox's board and shareholders now have two named suitors and a live price auction, with Nvidia's entry directly topping Intel's reported $6B — the eventual outcome was a $6.9B Nvidia purchase confirmed within days.
Second-order effects
- Intel loses the interconnect asset to its closest accelerator rival, forcing it to source or build networking alternatives for its own data-center push; Mellanox's Israeli engineering base becomes a Nvidia satellite rather than an Intel one.
Third-order effects
- The pattern points toward accelerator vendors buying their way into full data-center systems — a path Nvidia extended with its later talks to buy Arm from SoftBank — while cross-border deals of this size draw lasting regulatory attention, as shown by China's SAMR anti-monopoly probe tied to the Mellanox acquisition.
The trend: Data-center silicon is consolidating into vertically integrated AI platforms, with accelerator vendors paying premiums for networking assets and regulators increasingly shaping which combinations close.