NVidia invests $ 2 billion in Marvell Technology in silicon photonics partnership

NVidia and Marvell Technology have announced a strategic partnership to connect Marvell to the NVidia AI factory and AI-RAN ecosystem through NVidia NVLink Fusion™, offering customers building on NVidia architectures greater choice and flexibility in developing next-generation infrastructure, say the partners.

The companies will also collaborate on silicon photonics technology. With that objective, NVidia has invested $2 billion in Marvell.

The partnership builds on NVidia NVLink Fusion, a rack-scale platform that enables customers to develop what is described as “semi-custom AI infrastructure using the NVIDIA NVLink™ ecosystem”. Marvell will provide custom XPUs (heterogeneous computing processor units) and NVLink Fusion-compatible scale-up networking, while NVidia will provide the supporting technologies. Those include Vera CPU, ConnectX^® NICs, BlueField^® DPUs, NVLink interconnect and Spectrum-X™ switches, and the rack-scale AI compute.

NVidia’s announcement stated, “For customers developing custom XPUs, NVLink Fusion enables a heterogeneous AI infrastructure fully compatible with [our] systems, allowing seamless integration with NVidia GPU, LPU, networking and storage platforms.”

The companies also say they will work together to transform the world’s telecommunication network into AI infrastructure with NVidia’s Aerial AI-RAN for 5G/6G, and advance networking for AI, including optical interconnect solutions and silicon photonics technology.

Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVidia, commented, “The inference inflection has arrived. Token generation demand is surging, and the world is racing to build AI factories. Together with Marvell, we are enabling customers to leverage our AI infrastructure ecosystem and scale to build specialized AI compute.” 

Matt Murphy, chairman and CEO of Marvell, said, “Our expanded partnership with NVidia reflects the growing importance of high-speed connectivity, optical interconnect and accelerated infrastructure in scaling AI. By connecting Marvell’s leadership in high-performance analog, optical DSP, silicon photonics and custom silicon to NVidia’s AI ecosystem through NVLink Fusion, we are enabling customers to build scalable, efficient AI infrastructure.”