Google puts Marvell against Broadcom for AI chips

Google is bringing Marvell into its custom-chip strategy, setting up a potential counterweight to Broadcom as it expands its AI infrastructure. The Register reports that Marvell disclosed the relationship in an SEC filing on August 19, 2026.

The filing says Marvell will develop custom silicon that “attach[es] to the TPU ecosystem,” including:

• AI inference accelerators
• Storage controllers
• Network interface controllers
• Memory interface controllers
• Near-memory compute technology

Google has primarily relied on Broadcom for its Tensor Processing Units, although Broadcom’s involvement became public only in 2026. Marvell’s new role does not mean Broadcom is no longer building Google’s TPUs: the filing gives no details about how the two relationships will be divided, and both companies can supply much of the listed technology.

Marvell also issued Google a warrant to acquire nearly 59 million shares, currently worth about $12.2 billion. Google has not said whether it will exercise the warrant. Doing so would tie the companies to a multiyear chip-design collaboration.

Recommended reading

Meta AI arrives on Mac with screen-aware chat

Ava Chen • Aug 19, 2026 • 2 min read

The arrangement gives Google another source for technologies such as high-speed SerDes, multi-die XPU reference designs, CXL memory controllers and silicon-photonics interconnects. It could also let Google negotiate Broadcom and Marvell against each other on price and performance rather than depend on a single IP supplier.

One possible application is Marvell’s Photonic Fabric technology, which uses optical links to let multiple racks as far as 50 meters apart share a memory pool. Google’s TPUs already use high-speed optical circuit-switched links to communicate, so the technology could potentially help shift memory between TPU clusters as workloads change. The source stresses that this use case is speculative; the filing does not identify which Marvell technologies Google will adopt.

Broadcom shares fell about 4% during trading on August 19, 2026, as investors reacted to the disclosure. The filing leaves the central question unresolved: whether Marvell is being added for a specific technical advantage or mainly to reduce Google’s dependence on Broadcom.