Mellanox

Five years after clearing the deal, SAMR announced that a preliminary investigation found Nvidia had breached the anti-monopoly law and the 2020 conditions, and said it would investigate further before deciding penalties. The finding landed during US-China trade talks in Madrid and a week before Beijing told companies to stop buying Nvidia's China chips.

China's State Administration for Market Regulation opened an investigation into Nvidia. The investigation concerned suspected Anti-Monopoly Law violations and conditions attached to approval of Nvidia's Mellanox acquisition.

Nvidia announced plans to acquire Cumulus Networks. The companies did not announce a purchase price.

The acquisition completed at a transaction value of about $7 billion, adding Mellanox's roughly 3,000 employees and the InfiniBand, Spectrum Ethernet and BlueField DPU lines that became the networking half of Nvidia's data center segment. Within five years networking was a multi-billion-dollar quarterly business inside Nvidia.

Thirteen months after signing, China's State Administration for Market Regulation became the last authority to approve the deal, attaching behavioural conditions for six years: no bundling of GPUs with networking gear, supply on fair and non-discriminatory terms, and no restricting Chinese customers' access. The EU, Mexico and the US waiting period had already cleared.

Nvidia's first big acquisition, at $125 a share in cash, brought in the Israeli maker of InfiniBand and Ethernet interconnects that already sat inside most of the world's top supercomputers, after reports that Intel and Xilinx had also bid. Jensen Huang framed it as uniting compute and networking for data-center-scale computing; the deal needed approvals in the US, EU, Mexico and China.