For Nvidia, $7 Billion Is What It Takes to Dominate AI Hardware

The battle to dominate the AI computing market is heating up. As regular CPU performance gains shrink, this battle is increasingly playing out in the interconnect portion of the stack, the different technologies used to move data between processors, memory, storage devices, servers, and entire data centers. This week, Nvidia announced a power move in this battle. The company best known for its graphics processors, which power video games, cryptocurrency mining, supercomputers, and deep neural networks (the dominant type of computing architecture for AI), said it will acquire Yokneam, Israel, and Sunnyvale, California-based Mellanox Technologies, the leading maker of low-latency, high-bandwidth interconnect technologies.