Marvell Technology has granted Alphabet's Google a warrant to acquire a stake valued at approximately $12.18 billion, deepening the companies' collaboration on custom artificial intelligence chips.The announcement sent Marvell shares up more than 11% in premarket trading, while rival custom-chip supplier Broadcom fell more than 3%.The agreement centres on the growing demand for custom AI processors as technology companies seek alternatives to Nvidia's high-performance graphics processing units (GPUs), which dominate much of the AI infrastructure market.Under the deal, Marvell will help develop a range of technologies for Google, including:AI inference acceleratorsStorage solutionsNetworking technologiesMemory interface controllersNear-memory computing technologiesThe partnership strengthens Google's efforts to expand the capabilities of its proprietary Tensor Processing Units (TPUs), which are widely used to support artificial intelligence workloads across the company's products and cloud services.The move comes amid intensifying competition in the custom AI chip sector, where major technology companies are increasingly designing specialised processors tailored to their own computing needs.In April, Broadcom signed a long-term agreement with Google to develop and supply future generations of custom AI chips and related components for the company's next-generation AI infrastructure through 2031.The latest agreement with Marvell highlights the growing importance of custom silicon as businesses seek more cost-effective and energy-efficient options for running advanced AI models at scale.
