It has also become a titan of the networking industry with bigger datacenter Ethernet sales than any other vendor. In Q2, Nvidia's networking revenues topped $17.5 billion.
To put that in perspective, Cisco's revenue during that same period, across all products, was $17.3 billion. GPUzilla's arrival as a networking power feels sudden, yet Jensen Huang started working towards this status in 2019 with the $6.9 billion acquisition of long-time networking partner Mellanox .
At the time, Mellanox wasn't a big name in Ethernet switching. The company was mostly known for its ConnectX NICs and InfiniBand switches.
Outside of high-performance computing (HPC) and supercomputing clusters, and a big deployment at Microsoft, InfiniBand wasn't widely deployed in hyperscale datacenters. Buying Mellanox allowed Nvidia to reposition itself as a system builder, which means something different in the context of distributed compute.
Nvidia understood its datacenter customers weren't interested in buying GPUs or even servers; they wanted clusters of systems. For that, Nvidia needed interconnect and Mellanox's InfiniBand fit the bill. Relentless co-design Over the years, Huang has talked about co-design – designing components and software to work together for specific set of jobs rather than to be the best GPU, switch, or NIC.
