Marvell to buy Lumentum in $115 billion all-stock optics deal

Marvell Technology has signed a definitive merger agreement to acquire Lumentum for an enterprise value of $115 billion, bringing together two of the biggest players in data-centre optics. Tom's Hardware reported that the companies announced the deal in a joint press release dated 2 November.

Lumentum shareholders will receive 4.5 Marvell shares for each Lumentum share they hold, a package the companies value at about $1,132 per share. That figure is a 23.9 per cent premium to Lumentum's unaffected closing price on 28 October, the last trading day before reports of the deal moved the share price. Marvell's existing shareholders would own about 67 per cent of the combined company and Lumentum's about 33 per cent.

Bloomberg reported that the transaction is the second-largest tech deal ever, behind the SpaceX-xAI merger. Both boards approved the agreement unanimously, and closing is expected in the first half of 2028, subject to regulatory and shareholder approval.

EE Times framed the deal as evidence that silicon photonics has moved from a proposed answer to the power wall caused by interconnect inefficiency into an active market with an ecosystem ripe for exits. It cited a Woodside Capital Partners report that counted a series of recent deals over fifteen months, including Marvell's $3.54 billion purchase of Celestial AI and Nvidia's $2 billion investments in each of Coherent and Lumentum, followed by $3.2 billion more into Corning. Woodside's authors described the activity as a land grab for control points such as lasers, optical engines, packaging, test and foundry capacity, and said urgency will decline as the gaps fill.

Smaller companies are also attracting capital in optical circuit switching. Salience Labs raised $125 million in Series B funding, backed by Applied Ventures, AMD Ventures and Intel Capital, while Voyant Photonics said it is developing a chip-scale OCS engine for AI data-centre networks.