Marvell Technology Inc. has signed a definitive merger agreement to acquire Lumentum for an enterprise value of $115 billion, combining two of the biggest players in the data center optics market into one company. According to a joint press release on November 2nd, Lumentum shareholders will receive 4.5 Marvell shares for each share they own, which the companies put at about $1,132 per share. This figure represents a 23.9% premium over the company's unaffected closing price on October 28, the last trading day before reports of the deal affected prices.

The agreement — which leaves Marvell's current shareholders with about 67% of the combined company and Lumentum's with about 33% — is reportedly the second-largest tech transaction deal ever after the SpaceX-xAI merger, according to Bloomberg. Both boards have approved the deal unanimously, and it is expected to close in the first half of 2028, pending regulatory and shareholder approval.

The acquisition represents another significant expansion of Marvell's optical infrastructure portfolio, following its $10 billion acquisition of Inphi in 2021 and its $3.5 billion upfront purchase of optical interconnect startup Celestial AI, completed in February 2026. All three mergers and acquisitions involved companies handling different parts of one of the most critical AI infrastructures: optical connectivity.

As AI infrastructure continues to scale, optical connectivity is becoming increasingly important for moving vast amounts of data between processors, racks, data centers, and even on the accelerator board itself. With the acquisition of Lumentum, Marvell, which already supplies optical DSPs, silicon photonics, and high-speed SerDes, is positioning itself as one of the industry's major suppliers of optical interconnect technologies, spanning scale-across and scale-out networking to emerging scale-up and scale-in connections .

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