Semiconductor company Marvell sought to strengthen its cloud portfolio, striking a $1.1 billion deal to acquire cloud and edge networking solutions company Innovium.
Speaking on The Six Five podcast, Marvell COO Chris Koopmans said the deal “rounds out our portfolio of offerings for our hyperscale data center customers.” He added “Marvell now has the broadest portfolio of silicon solutions for hyperscale data centres to really help them design their next generation architecture.”
Specifically, the deal will give Marvell access to Innovium’s Teralynx switching architecture, allowing it to tap into what it flagged in a press release as “the fastest growing segment of the switch market.”
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Marvell recently closed a $10 billion deal to acquire storage and networking chipmaker Inphi in April. But while the Inphi move focused a lot on optical and physical layer technology, Nariman Yousefi, EVP of Marvell’s Automotive, Coherent DSP and Switch Group, explained on the podcast switching technology was still necessary to connect everything together. That’s where Innovium comes in.
“Now with the combination of both assets together we can provide very competitive solutions, we can innovate,” Yousefi said.
The transaction is expected to close by the end of this year, with Innovium founder and CTO Puneet Agarwal and most of the company’s staff set to join Marvell. Rather than making the leap, however, Innovium CEO Rajiv Khemani will become an advisor to Marvell once the deal wraps.
Marvell said it expects the acquisition to yield $150 million in incremental revenue in its next fiscal year. It noted Innovium has already been chosen as a supplier for a Tier 1 cloud customer, with that account expected to contribute to a significant bump in revenue in 2022.
