Marvell Technology (MRVL) got a premarket boost on Sunday after The Information reported that Alphabet’s Google is in talks with the chipmaker to co-develop two new AI chips.
Marvell Technology, Inc., MRVL
The stock jumped 6.3% by around 4:38 AM ET, giving traders an early jolt to start the week.
According to the report, two people familiar with the matter said the companies are working on a memory processing unit (MPU) designed to sit alongside Google’s existing tensor processing unit (TPU). The second chip is a brand new TPU built specifically for AI inference workloads.
The goal is to get the memory chip’s design locked in as soon as next year, after which the companies would move to test production.
This isn’t Google acting alone. The company has been quietly building out a semiconductor ecosystem, working with partners including Intel and Broadcom alongside Marvell.
For most of its history, Google kept its TPUs internal. That changed in 2022, when its cloud division took over external chip sales and started pushing TPUs to outside customers.
Since then, Google has ramped up both production and external sales. Last year, it started selling TPUs directly into customers’ own data centres — not just through its cloud platform. That’s a meaningful shift in go-to-market strategy.
Earlier this month, Google officially launched TorchTPU, a project to make its chips natively compatible with PyTorch — the dominant AI software framework. The move lowers the switching cost for developers who have already built their workflows around PyTorch and are considering moving off Nvidia’s hardware.
TPU sales have become a growing contributor to Google Cloud revenue as the company tries to prove to investors that its AI spending is generating returns.
Nvidia still dominates AI compute, but Google’s moves are putting more pressure on that position.
The Marvell partnership adds firepower to Google’s inference chip ambitions — a segment where Nvidia has also been expanding aggressively. Nvidia is reportedly developing new AI inference chips using technology from Groq.
With Google, Marvell, Intel, and Broadcom all moving in the same direction, the inference chip market is getting crowded fast.
Google’s first-quarter earnings are due on April 29. Investors will likely look for clues on how aggressively the company plans to scale TPU production, cloud revenue growth, and what the Marvell talks mean for its chip roadmap going forward.
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