Marvell Technology (MRVL) and Broadcom (AVGO) could be among a group of companies that benefit from Microsoft’s (MSFT) new Maia artificial intelligence chip, investment firm BNP Paribas said.
While Marvell is unlikely to be the supplier of the Maia 200 chip — BNP believes that could be Global Unichip — it, along with Broadcom, could benefit by being Ethernet application specific integrated circuit suppliers, analyst Karl Ackerman wrote in a note to clients.
Other potential beneficiaries include copper backplane suppliers, such as Amphenol (APH); optical transceiver suppliers; Arista Networks (ANET); and possibly Credo Technologies (CRDO) and Astera Labs (ALAB), if active electrical cables are used.
“We believe [the] Maia 200 rack system will have 12 compute trays, 4 Tier-1 Ethernet scale-up switches, 6 CPU head nodes, 2 top-of-rack (ToR) Ethernet switches for frontend networking, and 1 out-of-band management switch,” Ackerman wrote in a note to clients.
“What’s interesting to us is that Maia 200 will not utilize a backend, scale-out network,” Ackerman added. “Maia 200 will be deployed in small scale-up clusters of 6,144 ASICs, and these clusters will connect to the ‘outside world’ through CPU head nodes and frontend Ethernet network switches. Given that Maia 200 is tailored for inferencing workloads, we think this topology makes sense as inferencing workloads may not require superclusters of hundreds of thousands [of] ASICs to work in synchronization.”
Ackerman added that Microsoft’s Maia 200 deployments are set to ramp up in the second-half of 2026, with further deployment coming next year.