Shares of Marvell Technology rose after a report that the U.S. chipmaker is in talks with Alphabet’s Google to jointly develop two artificial intelligence chips, signalling deeper collaboration as Big Tech accelerates investment in custom silicon.
Marvell’s stock climbed about 7% in premarket trading following the report, which said the potential partnership would focus on designing chips aimed at improving the efficiency of AI workloads.
According to the report, the companies are discussing two key components. One is a memory processing unit intended to work alongside Google’s existing tensor processing units, while the other is a new TPU specifically designed to run AI models more efficiently, particularly for inference tasks.
The move reflects Google’s broader strategy to strengthen its in house hardware capabilities and reduce reliance on external suppliers such as Nvidia, whose high performance GPUs dominate the AI chip market but come with significant cost.
Google already works closely with Broadcom on TPU development, with a long term agreement in place, but analysts say talks with Marvell could signal an effort to diversify suppliers and gain leverage in negotiations while expanding its AI infrastructure.
For Marvell, the potential deal would further cement its role as a key player in the custom chip segment, where it helps major cloud companies design specialised semiconductors for data centres and AI applications. The company has benefited from surging demand for such chips as firms like Google, Amazon and Meta scale up AI capabilities.
Neither Google nor Marvell has officially confirmed the discussions, and Reuters noted the report could not be independently verified. Still, the market reaction underscores investor optimism about the commercial potential of custom AI chips, a sector expected to see sustained growth as companies seek faster and more cost efficient ways to run advanced models.
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