Marvell, NVIDIA Highlight Optics as Next Frontier for AI Data Centers
Reporting from Taipei, Taiwan: Marvell Technology and NVIDIA on Tuesday outlined a vision for the future of artificial intelligence infrastructure centered on connectivity and optical technologies, as growing workloads push data center design beyond traditional limits.
At Computex, Marvell CEO Matt Murphy said the rapid expansion of AI systems is shifting the industry’s focus away from compute and toward the challenge of linking vast numbers of processors together.
As AI models become more complex and data-intensive, he said, infrastructure must support significantly greater volumes of data moving across increasingly distributed environments. That shift is driving demand for higher bandwidth, lower latency, and new approaches to networking.
“Tens of thousands—and eventually millions—of computer processors must work together as a single, massive compute engine, making computing at this scale fundamentally a connectivity challenge —- the next major wave of innovation and scale,” said Murphy.
Murphy noted that workloads are no longer confined to a single data center, requiring larger facilities and new architectures capable of scaling across locations.
He said optical connectivity is emerging as a key technology to support that transition, while traditional copper connections will continue to play a role.
NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang echoed that view, highlighting the importance of distributed computing patterns driven by AI agents. Huang said the industry will rely on a mix of copper and optical interconnects over the next five to ten years as infrastructure evolves.
The two companies are deepening their partnership across areas including optics, photonics, and NVLink-based interconnects, backed by NVIDIA’s recent $2 billion investment.
Murphy also pointed to co-packaged optics as a solution to power and density challenges, calling it a major shift for the industry. “This is happening now,” Murphy said. “This is where the industry is heading.”
He added that the long-term goal is a “data center without distance,” where distributed resources operate seamlessly as a single system. “We believe this is the next era of computing infrastructure,” he concluded.
