Intel missed out on buying NVIDIA in 2005 for just $20 billion, missed the 'deal of a lifetime'

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Can you imagine the world as we know it, if Intel had acquired NVIDIA back in 2005 for just $20 billion? That's exactly what CEO at the time Paul Otellini floated to the board at Intel, but the "deal of a lifetime" was denied.

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In a new report from The New York Times, we're learning that former Intel CEO Pat Otellini pitched the idea of buying NVIDIA during a board meeting at the time, with the intent that the design of graphics chips would be fundamental for data center scalability in the future, but the pitch was rejected... I bet that hurts now, real, real bad.

We don't know exactly why the board at Intel denied the pitch to buy NVIDIA at the time, but it would've been a rather big acquisition at the time and $20 billion would've been a decent chunk of coin in 2005... however, that $20 billion is now worth $3.5+ trillion now.

• Read more: NVIDIA stock closes at a record high: market value at $3.39T, just below Apple at $3.52T

However, I think that if we look at how Intel has been running since 2005... if the company had acquired NVIDIA, I don't think NVIDIA would be the company it is now.

NVIDIA has been absolutely dominant in the consumer GPU market for well over a decade now, and it is the absolute leader in the AI business with its massively popular Hopper H100 and H200 AI GPUs, as well as its GB200 Superchip, and now its Blackwell B200 and GB200 are being pumped out with ultra-fast HBM3E memory. We have the B300 and GB300 chips coming in 2025, next-gen Rubin R100 with HBM4 in late 2025, and the GeForce RTX 50 series launching in early 2025.

• Read more: Insider reveals: NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang nearly sold NVIDIA to AMD in the 2000s
• Read more: NVIDIA's CEO is currently worth more than the entirety of Intel
• Read more: Qualcomm 'explored' buying PIECES of Intel chip design business, as Intel flounders its Foundry

I don't think we'd see continued success after success, release after release if Intel had acquired NVIDIA back in 2005. However, I bet they're kicking themselves now as Intel has been tripping over itself with its discrete Arc GPUs, and its intergrated GPUs are only just now getting better with Xe2 "Battlemage" inside of Lunar Lake processors for laptops.