Google pits Marvell against Broadcom as it chases AI crown

Major cloud providers typically outsource significant portions of chip design to IP houses such as Broadcom, Marvell, and Arm. Google has primarily relied on Broadcom for its Tensor Processing Units (TPUs), but the relationship is not exclusive. This week, Marvell announced that Google had tapped the IP house to develop custom silicon for the company's products.

The custom silicon programs will include AI inference accelerators, storage controllers, network interface controllers, memory interface controllers, and near memory compute. Marvell expects this deal to be a significant revenue driver for the company. While the specific technologies involved and Google's relationship with Broadcom remain undisclosed, the filing suggests that the search and advertising giant is diversifying its chip technology suppliers.

This move could potentially benefit Google by allowing it to negotiate better deals and improve the performance of its TPUs, which rely on high-speed optical circuit-switched links.