Marvell Inks Google Deal
+Marvell and Google have partnered to develop custom silicon that attaches to the TPU ecosystem, including *AI-inference* accelerators, near-memory compute, and accelerators for storage, networking, and memory.
Connected to this commercial agreement, Marvell is granting the search giant 59 million warrants at $207 per share.
Following the announcement, Marvell’s share price rose to $238. In addition to an initial 1.4 million warrants, Google receives the warrants in 240 equal tranches, with one tranche vesting for each $500 million it spends on Marvell custom products. In other words, Google has to buy a lot of silicon and pay $207 per warrant before it can claim its 6% of Marvell.
Show Yourself—the companies haven’t disclosed exactly what the custom products cover. Marvell offers standard storage, networking, and memory controllers/accelerators. Thus, it’s reasonable to assume that Google will buy these or variations thereof. At risk is Intel’s IPU (smart-NIC) chip, which it has developed for Google. “Near-memory compute” could refer to custom HBM base dice, which Marvell began publicly discussing in December 2024 (https://xpu.pub/2024/12/12/custom-hbm/).
Into the Unknown—the big head-scratcher, however, is the inference accelerators. For inference, the TPU ecosystem has, well, TPUs. Inference accelerators could be chips to complement TPUs, such as by handling the LLM decode stage while TPUs handle the prefill stage. It’s also been mooted that Google is developing a hard-wired (or nearly hard-wired) inference chip. Called Frozen v2, it would be similar to what Taalas offers (https://xpu.pub/2026/08/10/amd-taalas-ai-acceleration/) and would raise efficiency and performance. Taalas has recently been acquired by AMD, which itself has appeared in the press as a potential Google partner.
All is Found—Broadcom has been Google’s primary TPU partner, with MediaTek recently becoming a secondary partner. It had seemed that Marvell had limited traction with Google. Providing chips for multiple functions and offering up an equity stake, Marvell is now a key partner, even as Broadcom and MediaTek hold onto the TPU business.
