Nvidia's $6.9 B Mellanox Deal Powers Networking Lead

Nvidia's networking revenue topped $17.5 billion in Q2, edging out Cisco's $17.3 billion total sales. That lead came after Jensen Huang paid $6.9 billion for Mellanox in 2019. Mellanox was known mainly for ConnectX NICs and InfiniBand, not for Ethernet switching. Buying it let Nvidia reposition as a system builder that sells clusters, not just GPUs or servers. The company then co-designed switches, NICs and software to move petabytes of data across AI clusters. Analyst Sameh Boujelbene says customers pick Nvidia for its tightly integrated compute and networking architecture. Recursion's CTO Ben Mabey notes their 300-accelerator A100 cluster runs on Nvidia's Quantum InfiniBand and ConnectX, simplifying troubleshooting. He adds, "When you think about our workloads, it makes LLM training seem easy compared to the data we move."