Nvidia acquires network company Cumulus Networks for undisclosed amount

Nvidia has acquired network company Cumulus Networks. This company produces, among other things, open source software for network equipment, including an operating system for network switches. The two companies did not disclose how much Nvidia paid.

Nvidia and Cumulus announce the acquisition in a blog post. According to Nvidia, the network company supports ‘more than 100’ hardware platforms with its software, including a Linux distribution for network switches. With Cumulus Express, the company also supplies its own hardware in the form of a network switch, TechCrunch writes. Cumulus supplies switches with speeds up to 100Gbit/s.

It is not the first time that Nvidia has acquired a network company. In 2019, the company acquired Mellanox for $6.9 billion. That acquisition was officially completed at the end of April, about a week before the publication of this article. Cumulus and Mellanox previously did business with each other. Amit Katz, vice president of Ethernet switches at Mellanox, writes in a blog post that the company first partnered with Cumulus in 2013. The two companies officially entered into a partnership in March 2016. For example, Mellanox Spectrum switches currently already ship with Cumulus Linux.

With the acquisition of Cumulus, Nvidia can supply products for the entire network market, from ‘chips and systems to software’. The company is already active in this area: Nvidia’s data center branch achieved sales of $968 million in the past quarter, while revenue from gaming products amounted to $1.49 billion.

A Cumulus Express network switch