Marvell announced a definitive agreement to acquire privately-held Tanzanite Silicon Solutions, Inc., a leading developer of advanced Compute Express Link™ (CXL™) technologies, in an all-cash transaction. Marvell’s on-going data center-focused investments, including in its CXL solutions, have expanded the company’s addressable market to advance the industry’s most comprehensive portfolio of cloud-optimized silicon solutions. With today’s announced acquisition, Marvell strengthens its CXL development initiatives.
Existing server architectures face multiple memory scaling challenges and lack the ability to share memory resources efficiently. Simultaneously, workloads such as artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), analytics, and large-scale search, along with an emergence of the metaverse, are demanding increased memory performance and composability in the cloud. Silicon components based on CXL, an industry standard for connecting processors, accelerators and memory, will facilitate new cloud data center architectures with significant performance and efficiency benefits.
Tanzanite has developed extensive expertise in CXL technology that will help further accelerate Marvell’s vision of fully composable cloud infrastructure. CXL is integral to the company’s data center portfolio of compute, electro-optics, networking, security and storage. The benefits of CXL include infrastructure agility to instantly allocate resources tailored to workload requirements, resulting in improved utilization and reduced total cost of ownership (TCO).
“We believe that CXL will be a significant game-changer in enabling optimal resource utilization in next generation data centers, and the acquisition of Tanzanite advances our abilities to address our customers’ most challenging issues,” said Dan Christman, executive vice president, Storage Products Group, Marvell. “Marvell’s investment underscores our commitment to deliver on the promise of CXL across our industry-leading cloud portfolio spanning compute, electro-optics, networking, security and storage.”
“We are excited to see our vision for CXL leadership take a leap forward as part of Marvell, a company that is renowned for its customer-focused innovation,” said Shalesh Thusoo, CEO, Tanzanite. “CXL technologies offer a unique value proposition for a multitude of use cases and are helping shape the next generation composable data center. I’d like to thank our industry partners for their unwavering support and the entire Tanzanite team for their dedication and commitment in pioneering this technology and enabling us to achieve this milestone today.”
“The CXL standard will play a significant role in helping the industry deliver fully composable infrastructure for the cloud,” said Noam Mizrahi, corporate chief technology officer, Marvell. “The integration of CXL across our end-to-end, cloud-optimized silicon portfolio will bring new levels of data center efficiency, scalability and flexibility to power emerging metaverse and next generation AI applications.”
The future cloud data center will be built on fully disaggregated architecture utilizing CXL technology, requiring greater high-speed interconnectivity than ever combined with optimized compute, networking, memory, security and storage chipset solutions. With the broadest 5nm technology platform and the industry’s most complete end-to-end data infrastructure building blocks, Marvell is positioned as the cloud semiconductor solutions partner of choice. Marvell’s comprehensive portfolio of cloud offerings includes high-speed Alaska® active electrical cable (AEC) PAM4 DSPs and Ethernet PHYs; Bravera™ SSD and HDD controllers; Inphi® PAM4 electro-optics; COLORZ® data center interconnects (DCIs); OCTEON® data processor units (DPUs) for security, offload, and acceleration; Teralynx® Ethernet switches; custom Arm®-based server CPUs; and full custom ASICs.
Marvell will present the fundamentals of CXL technology and its role in helping bring fully composable cloud data center infrastructure to fruition in an upcoming Tech Talk webinar which will be announced later this month.
The transaction is expected to close in the second quarter of the current fiscal year and is subject to the satisfaction of customary closing conditions, including approval by Tanzanite’s shareholders.