Three critical constraints are shaping the evolution of AI infrastructure:

• The scale-up network: Scale-up domains are increasing in size, processor count, and complexity. As these systems extend beyond a single rack, maintaining high bandwidth and low latency becomes significantly more challenging.
• The memory wall: There is a widening gap between the memory capacity and bandwidth AI workloads require and what existing memory subsystems can deliver efficiently.
• Performance per watt: Energy efficiency is becoming a defining constraint, both for controlling operating costs and staying within data center power limits.

Together, these challenges point to a common problem: the increasing difficulty of moving data efficiently across AI systems, from compute to memory across the scale-up domain.

The Marvell® Photonic Fabric™ technology platform addresses these challenges by combining the advantages of optical interconnect with system-level design innovation.

Key capabilities include:

• High-bandwidth, low latency and longer-reach connectivity for larger clusters: Photonic Fabric technology offers sub-200ns XPU-to-XPU latency across distances up to 50 meters, without retimers.¹ This enables scale-up systems to extend beyond a single rack, supporting larger clusters with thousands of processors.
• Memory pooling and sharing: Memory attached to individual processors is limited in capacity and not shared across the system. The Photonic Fabric Memory Appliance, based on Photonic Fabric technology, is a low-latency, high-capacity rack mountable pod-scale (multi-rack) memory appliance that enables XPUs to share memory capacity, reducing memory cost ( $/GB) while improving XPU system performance efficiency and hence lower cost of inference.
• More efficient data movement: In modern AI systems, a significant portion of total power is consumed moving data between compute and memory. By integrating optics closer to the XPU, Photonic Fabric enables more efficient data transmission by minimizing losses across traditional electrical paths. This delivers up to 2x greater energy efficiency compared to copper and supports up to 2x more compute within the same space and power footprint.¹

The video below from OFC 2026 walks through more specifics of the Photonic Fabric technology.