Rumor
Nvidia reportedly evaluates Celestial AI technology for potential integration
Tuesday, March 31, 2026 at 12:15 PM
There are indications that Nvidia is evaluating or integrating optical interconnect technology from Celestial AI for its future AI infrastructure hardware.
Context
Recent reports indicate Nvidia is evaluating technology from Celestial AI, a silicon photonics specialist recently acquired by Marvell in February 2026 for a deal valued at up to $5.5 billion. The interest centers on Celestial AI’s Photonic Fabric, an interconnect platform designed to eliminate the ‘memory wall’ by providing high-bandwidth, low-latency data movement between compute units and shared memory pools. This evaluation follows Nvidia’s massive $4 billion investment earlier this month into optics leaders Coherent and Lumentum, signaling an aggressive shift toward optical networking to sustain the scaling of next-generation AI factories. As AI models move toward trillions of parameters, the move to integrate photonic interposers and co-packaged optics is becoming essential for maintaining hardware utilization. Marvell expects initial revenue from this technology to begin in the second half of fiscal 2028, eventually reaching a $1 billion annualized run rate by 2029. For Nvidia, incorporating such technology could be critical for its future Feynman and Rubin GPU architectures, which require unprecedented interconnect density to handle the rising arithmetic intensity of LLM inference workloads.
Sources (12)
Marvell Completes Acquisition of Celestial AI | Marvell Technology, Inc. (MRVL)
NVIDIA Corporation - NVIDIA and Coherent Announce Strategic Partnership to Develop Optics Technology to Scale Next-Generation Data Center Architecture
NVIDIA Announces Strategic Partnership With Lumentum to Develop State-of-the-Art Optics Technology | NVIDIA NewsroomMarvell to acquire Celestial AI for as much as $5.5 billion[PDF] Photonic Fabric Platform for AI Accelerators - arXivCelestial AI Acquisition Perfectly Positions Marvell For Upcoming Multi-Rack Scale-Up BoomCo Packaged Optics (CPO) – Scaling with Light for the Next Wave of InterconnectDriving Down The AI System Roadmap With Nvidia
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