On 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.