Intel supposedly wanted to buy Nvidia in 2005 and that does make complete sense. AMD bought ATI Technologies in 2006 after all. It would have been natural for Intel to expand its GPU offerings by buying Nvidia.
It certainly looks stupid to not have bought it now. Nvidia has created $3+ trillion in value, what’s $20 billion compared to that. Otellini was right to have suggested it.
In 2005, Intel CEO Paul Otellini surprised the company’s board. According to a report from the New York Times, he suggested that Intel buy Nvidia for “as much as” $20 billion.
According to the Times’s sources (“two people familiar with the boardroom discussion”), even some Intel executives thought that Nvidia’s designs could eventually play an important role in data centers. While that idea would come to fruition with the modern AI boom, the board pushed back against it. It would have been Intel’s most expensive acquisition, and there were worries about integrating the company. Otellini backed off, and that was that.
Everything Intel has done in the past 30 years is now under the microscope. Media companies are hunting for stories and the sad thing is Intel has a lot of not so good stories to tell. This isn’t the first and it won’t be the last revelation of mismanagement. Intel is full to the brim with non technical managers who fight for fiefdoms and aspire to the C-suite and that’s now becoming public information.
There was no guarantee of success though. Nvidia was not what it is today.
And I will remind you that GPUs were not seen through the same eyes then as they are today. Today they are seen as precious metals, rare, beautiful, and correspondingly expensive. Their use cases are large. Back in the day however, they were tools for a smaller group of people. They weren’t exciting or anything. GPUs, consumer and enterprise, were at the beginning of their upward spiral and it wasn’t really clear where or how high they were headed.
The point is buying Nvidia for $20 billion would have been prophetic.
However, if we look at what AMD did to ATI Technologies, buying Nvidia probably would have been a disaster. AMD squandered ATI’s advantages in the consumer and enterprise markets, taking a popular company and turning it into… well, nothing good. Even today, 18 years later I’m not seeing anybody going “Yes I want an AMD GPU”. You get an AMD because it’s cheap and has acceptable performance.
Intel probably would have destroyed the spirit of Nvidia just like AMD destroyed the spirit of ATI. Heck, in fact Intel probably would’ve destroyed the spirit of Nvidia and then sold it off for half of what it paid for it! You can’t seriously think that Intel’s management would not have destroyed a precious jewel! The second Intel’s management gets something good, they destroy it slowly and painfully. That’s just a fact.
Probably harsh to AMD and Intel but hey… You guys haven’t made the best decisions ever.
Anyway, to wrap up… ATI was pretty cool back in the day, Nvidia would’ve been a prophetic buy, and Intel has had poor management for a long time.