2 billion dollars put on the table and direct access to the AI factory in Santa Clara: NVIDIA seals an agreement with Marvell which targets the rack, fiber and antenna. As an immediate consequence, NVLink Fusion becomes the royal road for tailor-made XPUs compatible with NVIDIA GPUs and LPUs.
NVIDIA NVLink Fusion as part of an extended partnership
NVIDIA and Marvell announce a strategic partnership built around NVIDIA NVLink Fusiona rack-scale platform designed for semi-custom AI infrastructures, and a financial participation of $2 billion (≈1.85 billion as an indication) from NVIDIA in Marvell Technology, Inc. (NASDAQ: MRVL). The objective is clear: to offer more latitude to players who build on NVIDIA architectures, from internal scale-up to network scale-out.
Marvell will provide custom XPUs and scale-up networking compatible with NVLink Fusion, while NVIDIA will provide Vera CPU, ConnectX NICs, BlueField DPUs, NVLink interconnect, Spectrum-X switches and rack-scale AI stacking. The whole guarantees controlled heterogeneity: seamless integration with GPU, LPU, network and NVIDIA storage, while capitalizing on the brand’s software stack and supply chain.
Telecoms and optics: AI‒RAN and silicon photonics
The two companies are extending their cooperation to telecoms with NVIDIA Aerial AI‒RAN for 5G/6G to convert networks into AI infrastructures. On the transport side, the focus is on advanced optical interconnects and silicon photonics, an area where Marvell aligns high-performance optical DSPs and leading analog bricks.
Jensen Huang discusses the accelerating demand for inference and the imperative to build “AI factories”. Matt Murphy emphasizes the growing importance of high-speed connectivity, optics and accelerated infrastructure to bring AI to scale. In this configuration, NVLink Fusion acts as a common gateway between Marvell custom XPUs and the NVIDIA ecosystem.
For customers, the interest lies in the standardization of the interconnection and the network at the rack level while keeping control of the compute brick via custom XPUs. Alignment with ConnectX, BlueField and Spectrum‒X limits integration friction and secures scaling, particularly in optics.
Beyond financial logic, NVIDIA’s entry into Marvell’s capital anchors a technological coupling around optics and rack design. If the details of the
Source : TechPowerUp
