Marvell, whose chips connect and switch traffic inside AI data centers, has agreed to buy Lumentum, the maker of the lasers that carry that traffic as light, the two companies announce. They say the physical limits of copper are speeding up the move to light, so they want the chips and the lasers designed together.
Each Lumentum share becomes 4.5 Marvell shares in the all-stock deal, which gives Lumentum an enterprise value of $115 billion (about Php 7.3 trillion), or about $1,132 (about Php 71,800) a share. Lumentum’s shareholders will own about a third of the combined company.
Light already does the long runs. Marvell’s investor slides show plug-in optical modules linking data centers up to 1,000km apart and spanning a single data center, up to 2km. Closer in, across racks (up to 50m) and down to the chip package (up to 1m), links carry 100 to 1,000 times the bandwidth of links between data centers.
At those distances, separate modules give way to highly integrated optics built for each customer, the slides say, with the electronics and the optics designed together. They show optical engines packed around an AI processor or a network switch, fed by separate high-power lasers that plug in.
Lumentum brings those lasers, plus optical transceivers, optical circuit switches and its own indium phosphide chip plants, which Marvell’s slides call the world’s largest by wafer capacity. Its compact lasers also power 3D face recognition and proximity sensing in phones and wearables, and Lumentum says they’re in billions of devices.
That $115 billion is more than 22 times Lumentum’s yearly revenue, which the slides put at $5.1 billion (about Php 324 billion) at the pace of its latest quarter.
Matt Murphy will stay on as chairman and CEO of the combined company, and Lumentum CEO Michael Hurlston will join Marvell’s board. The deal still needs approval from both companies’ shareholders and from regulators, and it’s expected to close in the first half of 2028.
