Google's $12bn Marvell Warrant Is a Second Bet on Custom Silicon

Google has signed an expanded custom-silicon partnership with Marvell, and attached to it a warrant to buy up to $12.2 billion of Marvell stock.

Marvell confirmed the deal on Wednesday. Its shares rose 8 per cent on the news, extending a run that has more than tripled the stock over twelve months. Broadcom — Google's principal TPU partner — fell 5 per cent on the same day.

That pair of moves tells you how the market read it.

The structure

The warrant covers up to 58.9 million Marvell shares at $206.58 each, per a regulatory filing.

The vesting schedule is the part worth reading closely. 1.3 million shares vest in equal quarterly instalments across the first year after execution. The rest vest against discretionary purchases, running from Marvell's third quarter of 2027 through to the end of 2033, with one tranche unlocking for every $500 million of revenue from the custom products the two companies develop together.

This is not a passive equity stake. It is a mechanism that converts Google's own purchasing into Marvell equity — an alignment device that pays Google more the more it buys.

What Marvell is building

The scope goes wider than the accelerator itself: AI inference accelerators, storage controllers, network interface controllers, memory interface controllers, and near-memory compute — all tied to the TPU ecosystem.

That list is essentially the supporting cast around a training and inference chip. Marvell already does this work for hyperscalers including Amazon, positioning custom accelerators as an alternative to Nvidia's general-purpose GPUs.

Why now

Two things changed on Google's side.

First, Google has started selling TPUs to external customers, after years of keeping them largely inside its own data centres. A chip you sell is a product with a roadmap, a supply chain and second-source pressure — not an internal cost centre.

Second, the volumes are enormous. Google has built a financing operation to supply more than $150 billion of AI chips to Anthropic, per FT reporting earlier this month.

Set against that, April's Broadcom agreement to develop TPUs and components through to 2031 looks less like an exclusive and more like a first supplier. Adding Marvell is the standard playbook for anyone whose product has just become someone else's dependency: do not be single-sourced on the part that matters most.

The read

The $12 billion is the least interesting part. What the deal shows is that the custom-silicon layer has become competitive enough that Google will pay in equity to lock in a second designer. Broadcom's five per cent drop was the market pricing that in.

For enterprises planning AI infrastructure, the consequence arrives downstream: more custom accelerator supply, from more designers, aimed at inference rather than general-purpose compute. That is where the cost curve for running models in production bends.

Source: Financial Times — Google strikes $12bn AI chip deal with Marvell