Nvidia paid $125 a share for Mellanox, more than seven times its IPO price. In February 2007 that ending was far away. Mellanox was an Israeli chip company betting on InfiniBand, a fast networking standard most data centers had never used. Its chips linked the servers inside supercomputers and big storage systems so they could act like one machine. Most of the world's networks ran on Ethernet, and Mellanox had to prove that speed was worth a second standard.

Galileo Veterans Bet on InfiniBand

Eyal Waldman co-founded Mellanox in March 1999 and served as its chief executive and chairman. He had been vice president of engineering at Galileo Technology, an Israeli chip company that Marvell later bought. The InfiniBand Trade Association formed the same year, backed by IBM, Intel, Sun and others. Mellanox designed adapters and switch chips for the new standard. Most of its people and assets sat in Yokneam, in northern Israel, with a US office in Santa Clara.

Nvidia's Data Center Bet

Mellanox sold 6 million shares at $17 each in February 2007, raising $102 million, and listed on Nasdaq as MLNX. InfiniBand spread through the world's fastest supercomputers, and Mellanox added high-speed Ethernet products. As cloud and AI data centers grew, fast links between machines mattered more. In March 2019 Nvidia agreed to buy Mellanox for $125 a share in cash. The deal closed in April 2020.

Cover: Two Chinese Women Examining Thread and a Spider's Web in a Bamboo Grove, Yashima Gakutei. Art Institute of Chicago, public domain. Chosen for threads and a spider's web (interconnect).