I see that in early 2026 NVIDIA invested $2.0 billion in Marvell via convertible preferred stock, disclosed in Marvell’s quarterly filing, and that it came with an expanded silicon‑photonics collaboration for scale‑up networking. After years of not naming each other, Marvell now mentions NVIDIA throughout its disclosures. A dominant chip designer taking an equity stake in its interconnect supplier reads as a signal of how strategic the optical‑signal‑processing layer has become, yet the same partner remains a potential competitor in some product lines – both things are true at once.