Nvidia is more than just a leader in graphics and AI hardware. It has also become a titan of the networking industry with bigger datacenter Ethernet sales than any other vendor.

In Q2, Nvidia's networking revenues topped $17.5 billion. To put that in perspective, Cisco's revenue during that same period, across all products, was $17.3 billion.

GPUzilla's arrival as a networking power feels sudden, yet Jensen Huang started working towards this status in 2019 with the $6.9 billion acquisition of long-time networking partner Mellanox .

At the time, Mellanox wasn't a big name in Ethernet switching. The company was mostly known for its ConnectX NICs and InfiniBand switches. Outside of high-performance computing (HPC) and supercomputing clusters, and a big deployment at Microsoft, InfiniBand wasn't widely deployed in hyperscale datacenters.

Buying Mellanox allowed Nvidia to reposition itself as a system builder, which means something different in the context of distributed compute.…