Nvidia, an American graphics card maker, is reportedly acquiring Mellanox, an Israeli chipmaker for more than $7bn in cash.
According to Reuters, Nvidia outbid Intel’s $6bn offer and the deal could close as early as Monday.
Intel had made a $6bn offer to the company a few months ago and put itself on sale again in October last year and received attention from Xilinx, a US-based supplier of programmable logic devices and Microsoft.
This deal would be the graphics card makers largest acquisition ever. Mellanox is best known for its networking technology and high-performance computing. It also makes adapters, chips, and switches for InfiniBand and Ethernet network devices. The acquisition would give Nvidia’s data center business a much need boost.
The data center business accounts for one-third of Nvidia’s sales and reduced its dependence on the GPU sales and gaming market.