Mellanox
The Israeli company that built the fabric for supercomputers and data centres — InfiniBand and fast Ethernet — and became the backbone of Nvidia's AI clusters after the 2019 acquisition.
Founded in 1999 in Yokneam, Israel, with offices in Sunnyvale. Mellanox became the leading maker of InfiniBand adapters and switches, along with high-speed Ethernet cards (ConnectX), the components that tie together the nodes of supercomputers and large data centres where latency and bandwidth decide everything.
Nvidia bought the company in 2019 for around $6.9 billion, a deal that looked at the time to be about data-centre networking but proved strategic for AI: when training spreads across thousands of GPUs, the network is often the bottleneck. The technology lives on in Nvidia's networking arm and its BlueField DPUs.