Marvell’s $5.5B Celestial AI acquisition expands its role in AI data center hardware — firm now positioned to deliver next-gen optical interconnects

Marvell has announced the acquisition of Celestial AI for up to $5.5 billion, positioning itself to compete with tech giants like Nvidia, AMD, and Intel in AI data center hardware. Celestial AI's photonic interconnect platform, Orion architecture, aims to enhance data movement between compute domains, expand memory capacity, and reduce power consumption. Marvell's acquisition allows it to offer optical compute-fabric architecture, potentially revolutionizing large accelerator clusters and memory coherence in AI systems. The move reflects a trend where companies invest in specialized fabrics to support AI accelerators, acknowledging the critical role of interconnect technology in modern data center architectures.