GOOGLE TAPS MARVELL FOR NEW AI CHIP PUSH

Google is reportedly in talks with Marvell Technology to develop two new artificial intelligence chips, expanding its custom silicon supply chain as the company shifts more spending toward inference, the increasingly expensive stage of AI where trained models respond to users at scale.

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The discussions, first reported by The Information and later summarized by Reuters, involve a new memory processing unit designed to work alongside Google's Tensor Processing Units and a separate TPU built specifically for running AI models more efficiently. Google and Marvell have not publicly confirmed a final agreement.

The talks show how quickly the AI chip market is changing. Google has spent years building TPUs as an alternative to Nvidia GPUs inside its own cloud infrastructure. But as AI products move from research and training into daily use by hundreds of millions of people, the main cost pressure is shifting. Training a model is expensive, but it happens in concentrated cycles. Inference runs constantly, every time someone asks a chatbot a question, generates an image, searches with AI assistance, translates text, summarizes documents, or uses an AI agent. That recurring cost is now pushing cloud companies to redesign their hardware strategies around efficiency, supply diversity, and memory movement.

GOOGLE EXPANDS BEYOND BROADCOM

Google's custom AI chip supply chain has long depended heavily on Broadcom, which has played a central role in designing Google's TPUs. Earlier this month, Broadcom announced a long-term agreement to develop Google processors and networking components through 2031, reinforcing that relationship. The reported Marvell talks do not appear to replace Broadcom. They point instead to diversification.

That distinction is important. Google is not abandoning one partner for another. It is adding more design capacity and more negotiating leverage at a time when every major AI company is competing for chips, packaging capacity, high-bandwidth memory, and advanced manufacturing slots. A supply chain built around one partner can become expensive and strategically risky. A supply chain with Broadcom, MediaTek, and potentially Marvell gives Google more flexibility as TPU demand rises.