Marvell agrees to buy Lumentum for $115 billion in one of tech's biggest deals

[Asgard12]

The race to connect AI datacenters with custom chip designer Marvell having agreed to buy optical chip and networking company Lumentum in an all stock deal with an enterprise value of $115 billion including debt

Lumentum shareholders will receive 4.5 Marvell shares for each Lumentum share. Marvell says the combined company will be a leader in AI connectivity, joining its custom silicon with Lumentum's lasers and optical components

TechCrunch compares the size of the deal with Microsoft's $68.7 billion purchase of Activision Blizzard in 2022 and Dell's $67 billion takeover of EMC in 2016. The equity value is reported at about $80 billion

Nvidia is a major shareholder in both companies, having invested $2 billion in each in March 2026, one deal linked to Lumentum's laser components and the other to Marvell's optical networking. The merger is expected to close in the first half of 2028, subject to shareholder and regulatory approval

Optics has become one of the hottest corners of the chip industry, because moving data between thousands of GPUs is now as important as the GPUs themselves. Combining chip design with laser manufacturing makes strategic sense. A two year approval process shows how closely regulators will look at a deal this big

Is optical networking the next big battleground in AI hardware? And will regulators approve a deal of this size?

In one of the largest deals in tech history, Marvell buys Lumentum for $115B | TechCrunchtechcrunch.com