Marvell Wins AI Chip Deal with Google Worth $12.2 Billion

Marvell Technology Inc., a leading supplier of data center chips, has won a contract to design artificial intelligence (AI) chips for Google LLC. The deal extends beyond AI chip design and includes other areas where Marvell will collaborate with Google. In addition to the chip design work, Marvell issued a warrant that enables Google to purchase about 59 million units of common stock worth $12.2 billion.

The partnership between Marvell and Google is significant, as it involves custom chips that attach to the TPU (tensor processing unit) ecosystem. TPUs are proprietary AI accelerators that power Google's public cloud. One priority for the partnership is developing custom inference chips, but details about this aspect of the deal were not provided.

Marvell will also help Google develop other types of chips, including storage controllers and memory interface controllers, as well as near-memory computing devices. The company will prioritize the development of custom network interface controllers to optimize traffic flow between servers and data center networks.