According to sources familiar with the matter on Wednesday, Nvidia's $ 6.8 billion acquisition of chip maker Mellanox Technologies (hereinafter referred to as "Mellanox") will receive unconditional approval from EU antitrust authorities.
Nvidia is known for its powerful gaming graphics cards, and the company hopes to use this acquisition to enhance its data center and artificial intelligence (AI) business. This is the company's largest acquisition and will help it better compete with Intel.
The European Commission declined to comment on the news, which plans to make a decision on the deal by December 19. Nvidia and Mellanox also declined to comment.
U.S. regulatory authorities have approved the transaction unconditionally, while Mellanox's regulatory approval in China is still pending. Mellanox has major customers in China, such as Alibaba (NYSE: BABA) and Baidu (NASDAQ: BIDU).
Nvidia was once known for gaming chips, and now the company also offers chips designed to speed up processing of artificial intelligence tasks such as teaching servers to recognize images. Mellanox makes chips for connecting servers inside data centers. In a previous bidding war against Mellanox, Nvidia defeated Intel.
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