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Mellanox: Networking Chips that Power AI
Lesson 216 · מֵלָנוֹקְס
Mellanox Technologies was founded in 1999 in Yokneam by Eyal Waldman, Roni Ashuri and others, many of them 8200 alumni. The company built InfiniBand and Ethernet networking chips, switches and cards, used in supercomputers, data centers and AI clusters. NVIDIA acquired Mellanox in 2020 for $6.9B, at the time the second-largest Israeli tech exit ever. Today Mellanox is the foundation of NVIDIA's AI datacenter networking stack (NVLink, BlueField DPU, ConnectX cards).
Cultural note, Mellanox is the rare Israeli tech success that\'s not a software company, semiconductors, hardware, real engineering. Yokneam Illit (north of Haifa) is sometimes called "Israel\'s Silicon Valley", Mellanox, Marvell, Applied Materials and Intel Israel all have major sites there. Eyal Waldman\'s bet on InfiniBand against the broader Ethernet trend looked wrong in 2005, and was vindicated by AI training workloads from 2017 onward. The NVIDIA-Mellanox deal closed during early COVID and reshaped global AI infrastructure.
Company Basics
Networking Technology
AI Infrastructure
Hardware Industry
The NVIDIA Deal
InfiniBand Vindication
How Mellanox\'s bet on InfiniBand became central to AI infrastructure.