Insider reveals AMD nearly bought Nvidia, but Jensen Huang killed the deal

Nvidia has outstripped the market cap of both Intel and AMD. With this, it has become a much bigger player in the tech industry and has started getting more attention. An ex-AMD employee, for example, highlighted the current success of Nvidia and revealed that the company was almost near the point of being purchased when it was an upstart.

The former employee, Hemant Mohapatra, spent over six years at AMD, helping the company design the GPUs, APUs, and CPUs that the company sells today. He worked at the company in the mid to late 2000s, and he was there when AMD saw an opportunity in the GPU market.

Mohapatra says that there were negotiations for Nvidia and AMD to become one merged company. However, the deal fell through because Jensen Huang, the CEO of Nvidia, wanted to keep the proprietary and closed-source nature of the CUDA model used for Nvidia GPUs locked down.

Not wanting to give up on this long-term strategy, Huang didn't want Nvidia to merge with AMD unless he became the CEO of the joint company. Failing to make the deal go through, Hector Ruiz, the then-CEO of AMD, purchased ATI instead, successfully bringing Radeon under the company.

Phil Park, another long-time employee of AMD, verified Mohapatra's report, saying, "The anecdote about Jensen wanting to be CEO is true." Mohapatra adds that when AMD was making efforts to buy Nvidia, the company was seen as "one of the little boys." Its graphics cards were only attractive to serious gaming enthusiasts (PNY RTX 4060 XLR8 curr. $304.99 on Amazon).

ATI, on the other hand, had a larger market share, and Mohapatra says that AMD "never thought of" Nvidia "in the same league as ARM/Intel." However, as mentioned earlier, things have changed a lot, and Nvidia is now leaps ahead of both AMD and Intel.