GoKawiilOn Tuesday, Nvidia announced that it has invested $2 billion in Marvell Technology and entered a partnership through NVLink Fusion, the rack-scale platform that allows third-party silicon to plug into Nvidia's proprietary interconnect fabric. The deal covers custom XPUs, NVLink-compatible scale-up networking, silicon photonics, and AI-RAN infrastructure for 5G and 6G networks.
It’d be an understatement to say that this deal is unusual, given Marvell’s status as one of the two dominant custom ASIC design houses, alongside Broadcom. Its fastest-growing business is designing the custom AI accelerators that hyperscalers like AWS, Microsoft, and Google use to reduce their dependence on Nvidia GPUs.
But by pulling one of its most capable indirect competitors deeper into the NVLink ecosystem, the structure of NVLink Fusion means that arrangement will generate Nvidia revenue on every rack deployed. Here's how.
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NVLink Fusion
NVLink Fusion, announced at Computex 2025 last May, enables heterogeneous AI infrastructure where non-Nvidia accelerators can communicate with Nvidia GPUs, CPUs, and networking hardware over NVLink's high-bandwidth, low-latency fabric. NVLink delivers up to 1.8 TB/s per GPU, a huge bandwidth advantage over PCIe Gen5, and can scale to 72 accelerators per rack in its NVL72 configuration.
The platform is built around the OCP MGX rack architecture and includes a modular technology stack consisting of Nvidia GPUs, Vera CPUs, NVLink switch silicon, ConnectX SuperNICs, Bluefield DPUs, Spectrum-X switches, and Mission Control management software. Partners can plug their own custom XPUs or CPUs into the compute layer, but the surrounding infrastructure is all Nvidia.
Every NVLink Fusion platform must include at least one Nvidia product, whether a CPU, GPU, or switch. Nvidia has also retained control over which partners receive NVLink IP licenses, so custom chips designed to displace Nvidia's GPUs still generate the company revenue through infrastructure sales every time a rack goes live. Under the deal, Marvell will provide custom XPUs and NVLink Fusion-compatible scale-up networking, while Nvidia will supply the rest of the stack, including Vera CPUs, ConnectX NICs, Bluefield DPUs, NVLink interconnect, and Spectrum-X switches.
Marvell's ASIC business
Marvell reported $8.2 billion in revenue for its fiscal year 2026 ending January 2026, with data center revenue accounting for more than 74% of the total.
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