Nvidia is quietly building a multibillion-dollar behemoth to rival its chips business

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang was years ahead of the market when he pushed the company to start tinkering with building AI-specific chips back in 2010, more than a decade before the current buzz around AI. A similar move in 2020 — doubling down on data center networking with a strategic acquisition — has led to one of the company’s most lucrative and quickly growing divisions, but with little fanfare.

In just a few years, Nvidia’s networking business, designed to connect data centers, has grown into the company’s second-largest revenue driver behind compute. Last quarter, it reported $11 billion in revenue, a year-over-year increase of 267%, and brought in more than $31 billion for the full year, according to Nvidia’s most recent earnings.

Driven by growth in AI processing, the division includes tech like NVLink, which powers communication between GPUs on a data center rack; Nvidia InfiniBand Switches, an in-network computing platform; Spectrum-X, the ethernet platform for AI networking; and co-packaged optics switches, among others.

Together, Nvidia’s networking business includes all the tech needed for building an “AI factory,” a data center designed for training AI models.

Kevin Cook, a senior equity strategist at Zacks Investment research, told TechCrunch that Nvidia’s networking business is one of the most impressive new segments from the company. “[Nvidia’s networking business] reports $11 billion for the quarter; that number is greater than Cisco’s networking business, almost as big as the full-year estimates,” Cook said, adding it does in one quarter what Cisco’s business does in a year.

And yet — the business segment doesn’t draw the same attention as the company’s chip business, which is significantly larger. It also doesn’t get as much fanfare as the company’s gaming business, it’s original bread-and-butter business, which is nearly three times smaller.

The origin of Nvidia’s networking business comes from Mellanox, a networking company founded in Israel in 1999 that Nvidia acquired in 2020 for $7 billion.

Kevin Deierling is a senior vice president of networking at Nvidia and joined the company through the acquisition of Mellanox. Deierling told TechCrunch that people not knowing about Nvidia’s networking business could be his fault for doing a bad job of marketing it — but he doesn’t like that answer.

“People think of networking as just, ‘I got a printer, and I need to connect to it,’” Deierling said. “Jensen said this the first day when he acquired us, he said the data center is the new unit of computing. Networking is a lot more than just moving the smaller amounts of data between a compute node, it’s actually a foundation.”

While Deierling said he didn’t really understand why Huang bought the company when he did — he gets it now. Having a networking business alongside its GPU business allows the company to sell its chips with the tech that they work best with.

“When Jensen bought Mellanox in 2020, he saw that was the missing piece to make GPUs a complete package,” Cook, the Zack’s analyst, said.

Deierling added that he thinks another aspect of Nvidia networking’s success is that they only sell the tech as a full-stack solution, as opposed to individual components, and they don’t actually sell the tech themselves, but rather through their partners.

“I can’t think of other companies that have [the] full-stack capabilities that we have,” Deierling said. “We are really different. We build the full compute stack, fully integrated stack, and then we go to market through all of our partners.”

Nvidia just announced a whole new slew of updates to its networking system during Huang’s keynote address on March 16 at the company’s annual Nvidia GTC technology conference. The company launched the Nvidia Rubin platform, which includes six new chips to power an “AI supercomputer.” Nvidia also announced a new Nvidia Inference Context Memory Storage platform and more efficient Nvidia Spectrum-X Ethernet Photonics switches, among other products.

“It’s no longer a peripheral to connect the printer, some other slow I/O device,” Deierling said about networking. “It’s fundamental to the computer. In the old days, we had what was called the back lining inside the computer. Today, the network is the back lining of the AI factory, and it’s super important.”