Backbone of a Beast: Charting NVIDIA's Rise to Networking Titan
The Register, Saturday, October 31st, 2026
The Register traces how NVIDIA's $6.9 billion Mellanox purchase made it the top datacenter Ethernet vendor, with networking revenue above Cisco's.
NVIDIA's networking revenue topped $17.5 billion in Q2, versus Cisco's total revenue of $17.3 billion in the same period, and NVIDIA now has bigger datacenter Ethernet sales than any other vendor.
The article traces this to the 2019 acquisition of Mellanox for $6.9 billion.
Mellanox was then known for ConnectX NICs and InfiniBand switches, mainly used in HPC and a large Microsoft deployment.
The deal let NVIDIA reposition as a system builder, since customers wanted clusters rather than GPUs or servers, and that required interconnect.