“Datacenters are the most important computers in the world today, and in the future – as the workloads continue to change triggered by artificial intelligence, machine learning, data analytics and data sciences – future datacenters of all kinds will be built like high performance computers,” said Huang.

Rumors are that the Mellanox bidding process, which kicked off last year under pressures from activist investor firm Starboard (which purchased a 10.7 percent stake in the company in November 2017 – see our coverage at the time), was highly competitive and that Intel was a top contender. Huang would not or could not confirm reports that Intel was in the mix. But he said the bidding was competitive owing to the interconnect – specifically the intelligent interconnect – becoming more important than ever, with more of the computing workload conducted on the interconnect fabric. This is the so-called offloading approach that is fundamental to Mellanox’s technology strategy.

Huang also praised Mellanox’s style of networking and their “extraordinary” software stack that has been “galvanized and integrated into a large body of work over a long period of time.”

Most people do not realize all scale of negative consequences of Nvidia and Intel becoming monopolistic duopoly on high performance networking.

Industry rumors are that Mellanox had been sold in a hurry to introduce full and tight control and prevent shipment of newest product into China.