While earlier this month it looked like Intel was going to be the likely suitor to Mellanox Technologies, NVIDIA has managed to edge out Intel and the others bidding for the networking chip provider.

Rumors began this weekend that NVIDIA would be acquiring Mellanox and this morning they confirmed they will be acquiring Mellanox for $6.9 billion USD.

Acquiring Mellanox is a high performance computing (HPC) play and now gives NVIDIA more exposure in this space outside of GPU/compute with Mellanox's interconnect products widely being used among high-end servers for Ethernet and other network technologies. NVIDIA and Mellanox hardware is already used in both the much talked about Sierra and Summit super-computers.

NVIDIA expects their Mellanox acquisition to close by the end of the 2019 calendar year.