Posted on Tuesday, March 27 2007 @ 0:10 CEST by Thomas De Maesschalck
NVIDIA's CEO Jen-Hsun Huang recently defended the acquisition of graphics card maker 3Dfx in court:
Nvidia paid $70 million for 3Dfx in 2001. Creditors of the ex-company reckon the price should have been twice that. But chief executive Huang now reckons he paid too much, suggesting it was worth more like $15 million.
However he doesn't feel he was duped, he said. "I don't consider that we were duped," he told a US court. "We offered a fair deal. And they accepted our deal and they seemed happy with it."
Also in the frame to snap up 3Dfx was Taiwanese chip firm VIA. Nvidia had to try to out-bid VIA without knowing what it was offering. "I don't think it was in 3Dfx management's best interest to tell me what Via was offering," Huang said.
Nvidia benefited from the acquisition by picking up personnel who had worked on 3Dfx's successful Voodoo range.
