Samsung Electronics' stake in US chip designer Marvell surges nearly sevenfold in five years

Marvell's CXL controller 'Structera A' [Source: Marvell]

The share price of Marvell Technology, a US semiconductor design company that Samsung Electronics invested in back in 2021, has surged this year, pushing up the assessed value of Samsung's stake considerably. The 11.7 billion won ($8.34 million) investment made five years ago has grown to 79.5 billion won as of the end of the first half — a nearly sevenfold increase.

More notable than the investment return, however, is the partnership between the two companies. Having previously co-developed a new system-on-chip (SoC) for 5G network infrastructure, the two are now expected to find even greater business opportunities in CXL (Compute Express Link), a next-generation memory pooling technology.

According to the Financial Supervisory Service, the value of Samsung Electronics' Marvell stake stood at 79.5 billion won as of the end of the first half. Samsung purchased 173,000 Marvell shares for 11.7 billion won in October 2021, declaring the acquisition a pure financial investment with no intent to participate in management.

The holding ranks by far first in return among all shares Samsung holds purely for investment purposes, posting a gain of 579 percent.

As recently as the end of last year, the book value of the Marvell shares was 21.1 billion won — a return of less than twofold. The stock has since climbed sharply on growing expectations for AI adoption. From around $90 per share at the start of this year, Marvell's price has reached $237.27 as of Thursday.

Market interest intensified further after Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said at his keynote at Computex 2026 in Taiwan in June that Marvell could become the next company to reach a $1 trillion market capitalization. AI data centers are built from tens of thousands of chips, and Marvell's chips play a key role in connecting them.

Samsung's original decision to buy Marvell shares was not driven purely by financial gain. Marvell, a chip design firm with deep expertise in network infrastructure, had a long history of collaboration with Samsung — including supplying application processors for Samsung's personal digital assistant devices in the mid-2000s. That relationship extended into newer devices such as smartphones and tablet PCs.

In 2020, the two companies began jointly developing next-generation 5G network infrastructure. The following year, Samsung announced it had co-developed with Marvell a new SoC featuring improved power efficiency and network capacity, and brought it to market.

A CXL memory demo product based on Marvell's Structera, unveiled by Samsung Electronics at the OCP (Open Compute Project) Global Summit in San Jose, California, in October last year. [Source: Marvell]

As AI data centers proliferate, Marvell's interconnect technology draws growing attention. The company offers a CXL controller that enables memory, CPUs and GPUs to communicate seamlessly with one another.

CXL technology is cited as a solution to AI inference bottlenecks because it can dramatically expand memory capacity and use it like a shared reservoir. Even as the KV cache (Key-Value Cache) — which stores information previously computed by large language models (LLMs) — grows explosively in size, CXL memory modules (CMMs) can handle the load without performance degradation.

Samsung Electronics completed compatibility verification with Marvell's CXL controller, Structera, in September last year. At the time, Marvell announced it had finished interoperability testing with DDR4 and DDR5 memory solutions from Samsung Electronics, SK Hynix and Micron. The memory industry sees this as a stepping stone toward expanding the CXL ecosystem.

Samsung has already unveiled a CXL memory demo model built on Marvell's Structera, presenting it at the OCP Global Summit in San Jose, California, in October last year. According to Samsung's own verification results, a CXL system equipped with Structera can handle five times as many queries as a system using a standard CXL memory pooling device.

jeongwan@heraldcorp.com