Google's $12.2B Marvell Warrant Vests Chip by Chip

Marvell Technology has given Google the right to buy up to 58,970,907 of its shares at $206.58 apiece — roughly $12.2 billion at the strike price — as part of an expanded agreement to design custom silicon for Google's AI infrastructure. The warrant is exercisable through August 2033, and almost none of it vests on signing.

About 1.4 million shares vest in the first year of the deal. The other 57.6 million unlock in tranches of roughly 240,000 shares for every $500 million of qualifying chip purchases Google makes. Run that arithmetic to the end and full vesting implies Google buying on the order of $120 billion of Marvell silicon over the term, which would leave Alphabet as one of the chipmaker's largest shareholders. The warrant, in other words, is not a payment. It is a meter.

What Marvell is being hired to build is not a competitor to the Tensor Processing Unit but the ring of parts around it: AI inference accelerators, storage controllers, network interface controllers, memory interface controllers and near-memory compute. Those are the components that decide how much of a TPU pod's paper throughput survives contact with a real workload — and they are exactly the pieces Google has historically bought from a single partner.

That partner is Broadcom, which has co-designed Google's TPUs since 2015 and worked with the company on the gigawatt-scale TPU buildout announced in June. The market read the Marvell agreement as a second source rather than a replacement: Marvell rose about 10% on the news while Broadcom fell more than 5%. One analyst quoted after the announcement framed it as a growing pie at Google for new suppliers rather than competitive displacement, which is the polite version of saying Broadcom no longer holds the only key.

The financing shape is becoming familiar. Google has spent 2026 turning chip procurement into structured finance — its $200 billion TPU commitment leans on Anthropic's demand to underwrite the capacity — and equity-linked supply deals now run in both directions across the industry, from Nvidia's backstops for OpenAI data centres to OpenAI's own custom inference chip with Broadcom. What is unusual here is who holds the option. Google is not lending Marvell money or guaranteeing its revenue; it is taking upside in a supplier it intends to make large.

The disclosure worth watching is the vesting schedule itself. Every $500 million tranche that converts is a public tick on how fast Google is actually buying custom silicon — a number the company has never had to publish and now, tranche by tranche, effectively will.