· ai-devtools
Backbone of a beast – charting Nvidia's rise to networking titan
Nvidia is more than just a leader in graphics and AI hardware.
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.
