Nvidia invests $2B in Marvell to expand AI chip ecosystem with custom silicon and photonics
The investment integrates Marvell's custom chip design and silicon photonics technology into Nvidia's AI infrastructure ecosystem, giving hyperscalers more options beyond standard GPU configurations.
Nvidia announced on March 31 that it has made a $2 billion strategic investment in Marvell Technology as part of a new partnership focused on specialized AI chips, the Wall Street Journal reported. The investment will integrate Marvell into Nvidia's AI ecosystem, allowing customers building on Nvidia's platforms to access Marvell's custom silicon and silicon photonics capabilities alongside Nvidia's standard GPU and networking offerings.
Silicon photonics uses light rather than electrical signals to transmit data on chips, enabling significantly higher bandwidth and lower power consumption for the data interconnects that link processors in large AI clusters. As AI training runs scale to tens of thousands of GPUs, the speed and efficiency of those interconnects has become a critical performance constraint, making photonics technology increasingly valuable.
The Bloomberg television segment covering the announcement noted that Nvidia needs Marvell's photonics technology to connect chips at the scale its customers require.
Under the partnership, Marvell will provide custom chips while Nvidia supplies the supporting technologies and data center architecture. Jensen Huang, Nvidia's CEO, said the alliance would enable customers to leverage Nvidia's AI infrastructure ecosystem and scale to build specialized AI compute.
Marvell's stock rose approximately 4.7 percent on the announcement, while Nvidia gained 2.1 percent.
The deal deepens Nvidia's practice of making strategic investments in companies whose technology complements its GPU ecosystem without directly competing with it. Nvidia has previously invested in CoreWeave, the AI cloud provider, and has a major ongoing partnership with Marvell peer Groq under a separate $20 billion licensing agreement.
The Marvell investment signals that Nvidia is actively building out the full stack of components needed to deliver integrated AI infrastructure to its largest customers.
Read the original reporting at The Wall Street Journal.
