

By Winnie Wu, Senior Director Product Marketing at Marvell
Welcome to the beginning of row-scale computing.
At the 2025 OCP Global Summit, Marvell and Infraeo will showcase a breakthrough in high-speed interconnect technology — a 9-meter active electrical cable (AEC) capable of transmitting 800G across standard copper. The demonstration will take place in the Marvell booth #B1.
This latest innovation brings data center architecture one step closer to full row-scale AI system design, allowing copper connections that stretch across seven racks - that’s nearly the length of a standard 10-rack row. It builds on the prior achievement by Marvell of a 7-meter AEC demonstrated at OFC 2025, pushing high-speed copper technology even further beyond what was thought possible.
Pushing the Boundaries of Copper
Until now, copper connections in large-scale AI systems have been limited by reach. Traditional electrical cables lose signal quality as distance increases, restricting system architects to a few meters between servers or racks. The 9-meter AEC changes that equation.
By combining high-performance digital signal processing (DSP) with advanced noise reduction and signal integrity engineering, the new design extends copper’s effective range well beyond conventional limits, maintaining clean, low-latency data transfer over distances once thought achievable only with optical fiber.
By Annie Liao, Product Management Director, ODSP Marketing, Marvell
For over 20 years, PCIe, or Peripheral Component Interconnect Express, has been the dominant standard to connect processors, NICs, drives and other components within servers thanks to the low latency and high bandwidth of the protocol as well as the growing expertise around PCIe across the technology ecosystem. It will also play a leading role in defining the next generation of computing systems for AI through increases in performance and combining PCIe with optics.
Here’s why:
PCIe Transitions Are Accelerating
Seven years passed between the debut of PCIe Gen 3 (8 gigatransfers/second—GT/s) in 2010 and the release of PCIe Gen 4 (16 GT/sec) in 2017.1 Commercial adoption, meanwhile, took closer to a full decade2
Toward a terabit (per second): PCIe standards are being developed and adopted at a faster rate to keep up with the chip-to-chip interconnect speeds needed by system designers.
By Vienna Alexander, Marketing Content Professional, Marvell
Marvell is the Leading EDGE 2025 winner for its Ara product, a 3nm 1.6 Tbps PAM4 optical DSP platform, which enables the industry’s lowest power 1.6T optical modules. The engineering community voted to recognize the product as a leader in design innovation this year.
The EDGE awards celebrate outstanding innovations in product design for the engineering industry that have contributed to the advancement of technology. This award is presented by the Engineering Design & Automation Group, a subset of brands at Endeavor Business Media.
Ara is the industry’s first 3nm 1.6T PAM4 optical DSP platform. Marvell introduced it to meet growing interconnect bandwidth demands for AI and next-gen cloud data center scale-out networks.
By Xi Wang, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Connectivity, Marvell
AI has been a huge catalyst for the adoption of connectivity in networks.
Already, operators are deploying AI data centers with over 200,000 GPUs—and they’re moving even faster towards 1 million XPUs. Driven by the increase in bandwidth and the growing size and number of clusters needed for AI applications, we are in a massive growth market for interconnect solutions. Accordingly, the optical interconnect global market has doubled since 2020 to nearly 20 billion dollars in 2025, and it is expected to double again by 2030, with an industry CAGR (Compound Annual Growth Rate) of about 18%.1
By Alua Suleimenova, Senior Sustainability Program Manager, and Vienna Alexander, Marketing Content Professional
Marvell has achieved an A-list ranking in the CDP Supplier Engagement Assessment for the 2024 reporting cycle. Reaching this first-time accomplishment recognizes the company’s efforts and leadership in climate targets, climate risk assessment and management, and engaging with suppliers on climate action and sustainability.
The CDP is the largest sustainability disclosure platform that evaluates how companies are doing in terms of climate action. Specifically, its Supplier Engagement module grades companies’ performance on sustainability governance and business strategy, climate targets, climate risk management processes and Scope 3 greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions which can result from activities outside of companies’ four walls like those from outsourced manufacturing suppliers.
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