Silicon Photonics

NVIDIA’s $2 billion investment in Marvell matters because it extends NVIDIA’s influence beyond GPUs and into the custom silicon, optical, and network-fabric layers that now determine whether AI clusters scale cleanly. According to NVIDIA (2026), the partnership ties Marvell’s custom XPUs and NVLink Fusion-compatible scale-up networking to NVIDIA’s Vera CPUs, ConnectX NICs, BlueField DPUs, NVLink interconnect, and Spectrum-X switches, which means customers can build semi-custom AI systems without leaving NVIDIA’s control plane. ...

STMicroelectronics just entered high-volume production of its PIC100 silicon photonics platform — the manufacturing technology behind the 800G and 1.6T optical modules going into every major AI data center buildout. For network engineers, this is the plumbing layer beneath your VXLAN EVPN overlays and BGP fabrics, and understanding it is becoming essential as data centers push past 400G. Key Takeaway: Silicon photonics and co-packaged optics are the technologies enabling AI data center fabrics to scale to 800G/1.6T per link while cutting power consumption by up to 70% — and network engineers who understand the optical layer will design better fabrics and troubleshoot faster. ...