Marvell’s acquisition of Celestial AI could be one of the defining moves shaping the next era of AI infrastructure. This deal is a direct acknowledgment that today’s AI systems have outgrown the limits of copper and that the future of scale-up connectivity must be optical.
Why does this matter now? Because AI clusters are no longer single-rack systems. They are sprawling, multi-rack architectures where hundreds of XPUs must communicate as though they shared a unified pool of memory. That level of performance demands high-bandwidth, ultra-low-latency fabrics that copper simply cannot provide.
Celestial AI’s Photonic Fabric was purpose-built for this moment, delivering a true optical interconnect with massive bandwidth, nanosecond-class latency, strong thermal stability, and far greater power efficiency.
What makes this acquisition especially compelling is how precisely it positions Marvell for the next phase of data-center connectivity. The company already leads in scale-out and scale-across interconnects; adding Celestial AI’s optical scale-up platform completes its portfolio and strengthens its claim as the most comprehensive connectivity provider in the market. With Celestial already engaged with hyperscalers preparing to deploy optical scale-up architectures, this strategy is moving quickly from theory to commercialization.
Marvell expects meaningful revenue contributions beginning in the second half of fiscal 2028, ramping to a $1 billion annualized run rate the following year.
Ultimately, this acquisition underscores a larger shift: AI’s critical bottleneck is migrating from compute to connectivity. Marvell’s bet on optical fabrics may prove decisive in breaking that constraint. If large-scale AI is to keep advancing without running into power, bandwidth, and thermal walls, deals like this won’t be outliers, they’ll be the new standard.
