- Marvell inked a $540M deal to buy XConn shortly after acquiring optical interconnect startup Celestial AI
- The company “absolutely” sees optical as a high-growth opportunity, said analyst Jack Gold
- XConn tech could help Marvell scale AI memory bandwidth
Semiconductor company Marvell is sharpening its data center networking arsenal with a deal to buy XConn Technologies for $540 million.
XConn, which manufactures compute express link (CXL) and Peripheral Component Interconnect Express (PCIe) switching silicon will allow Marvell to expand its switching portfolio and add “highly experienced engineering talent with deep domain expertise in high-performance switching,” the company said in a press release.
IDC analyst Taranvir Singh noted the acquisition provides Marvell “access to hybrid switching silicon for optimized scale-up node interconnects and improves [its] positioning across data center connectivity stack.”
XConn is actually Marvell’s second-biggest deal in the last month, as the chipmaker in December also acquired optical interconnect startup Celestial AI for $3.25 billion.
Marvell isn’t a high-profile GPU maker like Nvidia, but it’s still shaping up to be an AI infrastructure powerhouse. The company already supplies high-speed interconnects for AI system providers like Dell, HPE and Supermicro, plus it makes custom AI chips for AWS and the like.
Data center revenues are also on the rise for Marvell, which in Q3 2025 saw 38% year-over-year growth in that segment.
With the XConn and Celestial AI assets, “we will be well positioned to deliver customers the performance, flexibility, and architectural choice they need as AI systems grow in size and complexity,” said Marvell CEO Mark Murphy in a statement.
Marvell’s optical opportunity
On the optical connectivity front, Marvell “absolutely” sees that market as a high-growth opportunity, J.Gold Associates Principal Jack Gold told Fierce. There, the chipmaker is competing with the likes of Cisco and Nokia, “although they are more about complete systems than Marvell at this point.”
Marvell already has a number of products in the space, “but trying to consolidate the market around them and expand the possibilities while lowering the competition is a viable strategy,” Gold said. “The optical market is still relatively small compared to the wired connectivity interface market, but it is growing with the need for high speed datacenter interconnects, and the emergence of chip to chip optical and not just rack to rack optical connections.”
Push to boost AI memory
Marvell wants to use XConn tech to bolster its work on Ultra Accelerator Link (UALink), an open industry standard that aims to support high-speed communication between AI accelerators.
Think of what Nvidia is doing with NVLink to scale memory bandwidth, though UALink proponents (which include AMD, Intel, Marvell and many others) advocate for a multi-vendor approach.
According to Wells Fargo analyst Aaron Rakers, Marvell’s XConn acquisition is “continued evidence of the importance of memory pooling technologies in performant/competing hardware solutions, most specifically enabling larger models, larger context sides and increased inference performance.”