Marvell agreed to acquire Lumentum in an all-stock deal that values Lumentum at an implied enterprise value of $115B, the companies said. Lumentum holders will receive 4.500 Marvell shares for each share they own, about $1,132 per share and a 23.9% premium to Oct. 28 closing prices, the last session before talks were reported. Marvell holders will own about 67% of the combined company and Lumentum holders 33%. Marvell cited more than $1B in annual run-rate cost synergies and a $550B addressable market, and expects the deal to be accretive to non-GAAP earnings per share in the first year. Closing is expected in the first half of 2028, subject to shareholder and regulatory approvals. CEO Matt Murphy said AI infrastructure is shifting toward optical connectivity, “creating an opportunity that comes along once in a generation.” (Marvell press release)
Private Companies
AM Intelligencefundraise
AM Intelligence, the Hyderabad AI infrastructure company reportedly owned by the founders of renewable energy firm Greenko, is seeking up to $3B in debt to pay for Nvidia Rubin GPUs, Bloomberg reported. The money would come from bonds and bank loans, with the split not yet set, and potential offtakers are expected to add $300M in advance payments. The company plans to buy 29,000 Rubin GPUs for 100MW of capacity, a $6B investment split between Malaysia and India. It did not respond to a request for comment (CNBC)
Nano-core Chipfundraise
Nano-core Chip, a Hangzhou inference chip startup, raised more than RMB 1B (about $150M) in a Series C2 announced Oct. 28. JianTou Investment led, with Hangzhou Capital, Kaitai Capital and other investors, following a RMB 1B (about $150M) Series C1 in September. Founded in 2021 and incubated at a Peking University research institute in Zhejiang, the company combines 3D near-memory computing, in-memory computing and RISC-V processing. Its first three chips have taped out, with customer sampling and initial volume shipments planned for early 2027 (TechNode)
Public Markets
Lumentum closed at $840.70, down 8.6% (Yahoo Finance)
AMD fell 10.9% as the Philadelphia semiconductor index dropped 7.2%. Dell fell 10.8% and Nvidia about 4%, in selling that centered on whether Big Tech’s AI spending will pay off after Amazon and Alphabet missed estimates. AMD reports earnings this week (Yahoo Finance)
Emerging
Blackwell Ultra, measured: A paper from Mohsen Zand, Trung Dac Nguyen and H. Birali Runesha, Matching Workloads to Blackwell: Power-Resolved Benchmarking of NVIDIA B200 and B300 across HPC and AI Workloads, ran both GPUs on two eight-GPU clusters. The B300 trailed the B200 by up to 5.6x on convolutional inference, up to 8x on 3D vision transformer training and 16x on double-precision Quantum ESPRESSO, and posted 24%–27% lower throughput on Llama-3-70B, while winning on ViT-Large. On the lagging workloads it drew 36%–53% of its 1100W board envelope. The results are measured on physical clusters, and two B300 nodes with identical hardware differed by 2.1x in time-to-first-token because of a development vLLM build (arXiv)
TPU in orbit: Google said its Project Suncatcher prototype satellite returned its first AI response from orbit, a haiku written by the Gemma 4 model running on a TPU. The satellite carries four TPUs but runs one at a time, on up to 1kW of solar power, for about 20 minutes per run. Two more satellites with higher power generation and inter-satellite optical links are planned for 2027 (TechCrunch)