Nvidia and Marvell announce a strategic partnership around NVLink Fusion, in which Nvidia is investing $2 billion in Marvell.
Nvidia invests two billion dollars in chipmaker Marvell. This investment is based on Nvidia and the integration of Marvell’s technology into Nvidia’s AI ecosystem and data center. The goal is to enable customers to develop semi-custom AI infrastructure based on Nvidia’s NVLink Fusion platform. Marvell provides custom XPUs and scalable networking technology, while Nvidia further opens up its existing portfolio, including new Vera processors, ConnectX network cards, and BlueField DPUs.
NVLink Fusion
NVLink Fusion is the heart of the collaboration. This platform should remain the foundation of customers’ infrastructure. Marvell is ensuring that it can be extended to non-Nvidia components without compromising integration.
The partnership is also expected to support the development of custom accelerators. Indeed, major technological players such as AWS, Meta, Microsoft and Google are developing their own (AI) accelerators. With the help of Marvell, Nvidia wants to position its underlying platform as being compatible with this type of hardware.
Nvidia and Marvell are working simultaneously on the integration of optical interconnect technology. Marvell brings its expertise in the field of analog, notably optical DSP and silicon photonics.
Essential in the data center
Nvidia is aware that the demand for AI components is enormous and is not being destabilized by the development of chips that essentially compete with its own GPUs. Jensen Huang realizes that Nvidia’s market dominance today is not just about powerful GPUs, but more importantly about the surrounding ecosystem of other chips and software. By investing in Marvell and enabling integration with this ecosystem, Nvidia can further strengthen its position in AI data centers.
With this investment, Nvidia is not only aiming for a strengthened position within the AI-driven mobile network exchange, but also a growing role in telecommunications networks. Using Nvidia’s Aerial AI-RAN technology, companies aim to transform 5G and 6G networks into AI-driven infrastructures.
