Enterprise

Marvell hands Google a $12.2 billion stock warrant in landmark custom-chip pact

The SEC filing ties Google's right to buy nearly 59 million Marvell shares at $206.58 apiece to $500 million tranches of custom-silicon purchases running through fiscal 2033.

By Asher Glick · Enterprise software desk · 2026-08-19 · 3 min read

Photo: Unsplash / Umberto — Close-up macro of a silicon microchip on a circuit board

Marvell Technology has issued Google a warrant to buy up to 58,970,907 of its shares at $206.58 each, an instrument worth roughly $12.18 billion at full exercise and disclosed in an 8-K filed with the SEC on August 19, 2026. The warrant, dated the day prior, is welded to a commercial agreement the two companies signed on July 29 covering custom silicon for Google’s TPU ecosystem: AI inference accelerators, storage controllers, network and memory interface controllers, and near-memory compute.

The vesting mechanics are the story. A first tranche of 1,360,867 shares vests in equal quarterly installments over the year following execution. The remaining shares are carved into 240 equal tranches, each of which vests only when Google buys another $500 million in Custom Products from Marvell. Run the multiplication and the upside case, flagged by Reuters, is up to $120 billion in cumulative purchases through fiscal 2033, when the warrant expires on August 18.

Markets read the framing immediately. Marvell rallied nearly 10% on the news; Broadcom, until now Google’s primary custom-chip partner, slid more than 5%; Alphabet was little changed. Morningstar’s William Kerwin called it “a big win for Marvell” while framing the arrangement as a widening of Google’s supplier bench rather than a displacement of Broadcom, the pie getting larger rather than resliced.

The structure sits at the center of an argument Bloomberg has been sharpening for months, that “circular” deals binding chipmaker sales to customer equity or spending commitments are inflating valuations and stoking AI-bubble fears. It’s the same pattern that ran through the 2000 telecom-equipment cycle, when vendor financing linked Lucent and Nortel’s revenue to customers who couldn’t ultimately pay for the gear.

Marvell’s version is a cleaner draft of that trade. No shares vest until real dollars move. If Google doesn’t spend, Google doesn’t own. The warrant is less a subsidy than a contractual promise that a hyperscaler’s silicon roadmap now runs, in part, through Santa Clara. What that says about elite AI-infrastructure psychology in 2026 is that even the buyers no longer trust the buyers.

Sources