Marvell bolsters UALink switching portfolio with XConn Technologies deal
Key Highlights
- Marvell’s acquisition of XConn broadens its data center switching portfolio with PCIe and CXL products, supporting next-generation AI and cloud infrastructure.
- The deal includes highly experienced engineering talent, enhancing Marvell’s capabilities in high-performance, low-latency switching solutions.
- XConn’s current and upcoming PCIe 5, PCIe 6, CXL 2.0, and CXL 3.1 switches position Marvell to capture expanding market opportunities in memory disaggregation and accelerated systems.
- The integration aims to support multi-rack data center designs, enabling flexible resource sharing and high-bandwidth interconnects for large-scale AI workloads.
- Expected revenue contributions from XConn’s products are projected to begin in 2027, with significant growth anticipated by 2028, strengthening Marvell’s market presence.
What is UALink?
Ultra Accelerator Link (UALink) is an open industry standard for high-bandwidth, low-latency, die-to-die communication between AI accelerators, enabling massive scale-up of AI systems by allowing them to share memory and work together efficiently. Developed by major tech companies such as AMD, Apple, Google, Meta, and Microsoft, it provides direct load, store, and atomic operations, creating a unified memory pool for large models and improving performance, efficiency, and interoperability.
Marvell has reached a deal to acquire XConn Technologies, a provider of advanced PCIe and CXL switching silicon, furthering its effort to become a key data center networking supplier.
The acquisition expands Marvell’s switching portfolio by adding XConn’s PCIe and CXL products. It augments Marvell’s Ultra Accelerator Link (UALink) scale-up switch team, adding highly experienced engineering talent with deep domain expertise in high-performance switching.
The acquisition of XConn addresses the need to accommodate the evolution of data center system design from single-rack deployments to larger, multi-rack configurations. These new platforms require a high-bandwidth, ultra-low-latency scale-up fabric, such as UALink, to connect large numbers of XPUs and enable more flexible resource sharing across the system.
Marvell will acquire XConn for about $540 million, with about 60% in cash and 40% in stock, with the stock portion valued at Marvell’s 20-day volume-weighted average price (VWAP).
After meeting customary closing conditions and regulatory approvals, the acquisition is expected to close in early calendar 2026.
As a combined company, Marvell and XConn will have a broader set of resources and an integrated team to fully address UALink switching and support the growing list of customers and partners who want to work with Marvell to evolve their next-generation AI platforms.
“This combination creates a compelling switching platform for accelerated infrastructure, advancing Marvell’s connectivity strategy for next-generation AI and cloud data centers,” said Matt Murphy, chairman and CEO of Marvell. “With XConn, we add proven PCIe and CXL switch products, IP, and engineering talent to expand our UALink scale-up switch team.”
Scale-up Switch rising
A 2025 Lightcounting report found that the Scale-up Switch market has already surpassed the Ethernet and InfiniBand markets. Based on Nvidia's AI platform roadmap, the research firm’s forecast covers five NVLink generations from Hopper (2022) through Feynman (2028). In addition to NVIDIA, Lightcounting expects the new Ultra Accelerator Link (UALink) specification to enable a path from proprietary protocols to standardization at 200G/lane, and that UALink switches could account for 20% of the total scale-up switch market by 2028.
PCIe and CXL switch opportunities
The XConn acquisition will enable Marvell to expand its Total Addressable Market (TAM) by addressing the growing PCIe and CXL switch opportunity.
While PCIe switching has been foundational to traditional computing architectures, it has become a critical building block for accelerated infrastructure. Likewise, CXL is becoming essential for memory disaggregation in modern data centers.
Marvell said the combination of its CXL memory-expansion controllers with XConn CXL switches will create a more “comprehensive CXL portfolio to support demanding AI workloads.”
Another key element XConn brings is a collection of 20 customers. The company’s PCIe 5 and CXL 2.0 switches are in production today, and its PCIe 6 and CXL 3.1 switches are currently sampling.
Marvell said it expects its XConn CXL and PCIe switching products to begin contributing revenue in the second half of fiscal year 2027. At that time, XConn will become accretive to Marvell’s non-GAAP earnings, ramping to approximately $100 million in revenue in fiscal 2028.
Advancing data center vision
XConn is one of Marvell's latest acquisitions, further solidifying its position in the data center industry.
In December, Marvell moved to acquire Celestial AI for $3.25 billion, a provider of a photonic fabric technology platform for scale-up optical interconnection, bringing it another step closer to realigning its focus on AI and cloud data centers with its own co-packaged optics solution.
By acquiring Celestial AI, Marvell enhances its co-packaged optics capabilities to enable AI to run on accelerated systems evolving into multi-rack configurations, connecting hundreds of XPU nodes with an integrated, high-bandwidth, low-latency, any-to-any scale-up fabric. This architecture allows each XPU to access the memory of every other XPU directly.
Similar to its acquisition of XConn, Marvell’s Celestial AI acquisition comes as it sheds itself of other assets that are not core to its data center vision. Over the past six years, Marvell has divested its Wi-Fi business and acquired Avera, Aquantia, Inphi, and Innovium.
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About the Author
Sean Buckley
Sean is responsible for establishing and executing the editorial strategy of Lightwave across its website, email newsletters, events, and other information products.
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