Marvell Technology has entered a definitive agreement to acquire Celestial AI, the company behind a breakthrough Photonic Fabric platform. As cloud providers and hyperscalers race to scale AI workloads across multi-rack systems, this deal worth $2.35B will redefine how silicon, memory, and compute communicate inside next-generation data centres.
A new era of data centre connectivity
AI has pushed traditional data-centre architecture to its limits. What once lived comfortably within a single server rack now stretches across hundreds of XPUs that need to exchange memory at lightning speeds. To handle this level of scale, data centres are shifting from electrical to optical links, offering higher bandwidth, ultra-low latency, and far better power efficiency.
This is where Marvell sees a multi-billion-dollar semiconductor opportunity. By combining Celestial AI’s scale-up optical interconnects with Marvell’s established leadership in scale-out and scale-across networking, the company aims to build the industry’s most complete portfolio for high-bandwidth, low-power data centre connectivity. The strategy plants Marvell firmly at the centre of next-generation AI and cloud infrastructure.
Led by veterans in the industry
Celestial AI was established in 2020 by industry veterans David Lazovsky and Preet Virk. David Lazovsky, serving as the company’s CEO, brings extensive experience from the semiconductor industry. Prior to co-founding Celestial AI, he founded and led Intermolecular, Inc., a company specialising in advanced materials and processes for the semiconductor and clean energy sectors.
Preet Virk, the COO, also has a rich background in the semiconductor industry. Before co-founding Celestial AI, he held leadership positions at companies like Macom and Mindspeed Technologies, where he focused on developing high-performance analog and mixed-signal semiconductor solutions.
Celestial AI’s Photonic Fabric takes centre stage
Every corner of the data centre is moving from copper to optics, and the next inflection point is within the rack and even within the chip package. Celestial AI anticipated this shift with its Photonic Fabric technology, a purpose-built optical fabric that allows large AI clusters to scale seamlessly within and across racks.
The company’s chiplets deliver over twice the power efficiency of copper connections, along with far greater reach and nanosecond-class latency. Their thermal stability is a standout advantage, enabling reliable operation alongside multikilowatt XPUs and allowing the optics to be co-packaged directly into the XPU rather than from the edge of the die. This compact layout frees up valuable chip real estate, making room for significantly more HBM inside the same package, an essential priority in the AI era.
Celestial AI’s first Photonic Fabric chiplet already showcases what this future looks like: 16 terabits per second of bandwidth from a single compact chiplet, ten times higher than today’s leading 1.6T links. Multiple hyperscalers are already working with the technology for next-generation scale-up architectures, paving the way for large-scale commercial deployment.
Revenue outlook and long-term possibilities
Marvell expects Celestial AI to begin contributing revenue in the second half of fiscal 2028, with an annualised run rate of $500 million in the fourth quarter of 2028 and $1 billion by the fourth quarter of 2029. Beyond scale-up networking, Photonic Fabric has the potential to unlock pooled memory architectures and optical replacements for conventional die-to-die electrical connections, expanding well beyond today’s data centre use cases.
With this acquisition, Marvell isn’t just enhancing its roadmap. It is positioning itself to lead the optical transformation of data centre silicon, an evolution that will define the next decade of AI infrastructure.
“Marvell is the ideal home for our Photonic Fabric, with the scale, customer relationships, and connectivity leadership to take this platform into high-volume production,” said David Lazovsky, Co-Founder and CEO of Celestial AI. “Together with Marvell’s scale-up switching strategy, we’re excited to accelerate the transition to optical scale-up interconnect and expand what next-generation AI infrastructure can achieve.”
“The acquisition of Celestial AI is a transformative step in Marvell’s evolution and expands our leadership in AI connectivity, as scale-up becomes the next frontier in AI infrastructure,” said Matt Murphy, Chairman and CEO of Marvell. “This builds on our technology leadership, broadens our addressable market in scale-up connectivity, and accelerates our roadmap to deliver the industry’s most complete connectivity platform for AI and cloud customers.”
“AI infrastructure is transforming faster than ever, and the future demands scale-up fabrics that deliver unprecedented bandwidth, power efficiency, and reach,” said Sandeep Bharathi, President, Data Center Group. “By combining our UALink scale-up switch roadmap and Celestial AI’s breakthrough optical scale-up interconnect, we will enable customers to build AI systems that scale beyond the limits of copper and redefine what’s possible in AI data centre architecture.”
“At AWS, we aim to be at the forefront of major technology inflections, and we believe optical interconnects will play an important role in the future of AI infrastructure. Building a scalable, high-performance, and power-efficient cloud starts with an approach built upon differentiated technologies,” said Dave Brown, Vice President of Compute and Machine Learning Services at AWS. “Celestial AI has made impressive progress, and we expect its combination with a large-scale semiconductor company like Marvell will help further accelerate optical scale-up innovation for next-generation AI deployments.”
