GoKawiilWhile hyperscalers rush toward expansion amid the swelling demand for AI data centers, Marvell last week shared its vision for an optical interconnect solution that can theoretically pool resources between discrete data centers across thousands of kilometers.
Optical interconnections are steadily being deployed across the industry, over both short and long-distance connections, and we're going to be seeing much more in the future, according to Matt Murphy, Chief Executive at Marvell, speaking at Computex 2026.
"Imagine future data centers, a globally optically interconnected data infrastructure," Murphy said. "These rigid boundaries we have today, and the systems we have, they begin to disappear. Compute can now be pooled, memory can be pooled, and infrastructure can be composed dynamically at scale."
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Constrained by distance
Murphy says that workloads no longer fit within one data center, which is why hyperscale cloud service providers increasingly need to build entire campuses consisting of multiple data centers connected by high-speed links, as clusters are becoming larger than a single data center.
Today, connecting multiple data centers within a single campus is not easy or cheap, but relatively straightforward. However, Marvell envisions that in the future it will need to connect data centers that are located at considerable distances from one another.
This is why Marvell is working on coherent optics and long-haul scale across optical networking technologies, which will connect data centers separated by thousands of kilometers. Marvell already has products which enable such connectivity today, including the Colorz 1600 1.6 Tb/s coherent optical solution based on a 2nm DSP, which targets inter-data-center connectivity and will sample later this year.
In addition, Marvell says it will offer the Ara 1.6 Tb/s family of interconnect solutions for data centers (with 3nm DSPs) as well as the Teralynx T100 102.4 Tb/s Ethernet switch, which supports 512 ports running at 200 Gb/s or 64 ports running at 1.6 Tb/s.
Murphy argues that today's architectures are constrained by distance because of copper interconnects: CPUs sit near memory because latency matters, GPUs sit near memory because bandwidth matters. As a result, workloads must be partitioned according to those physical limits. The head of Marvell claims that once optical interconnects penetrate scale-up interconnects, scale-up domains will not be limited by copper cable lengths, and those constraints will begin to disappear.
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