TMT dealflow map heats up
- Social threads map active TMT M&A including Marvell/Celestial AI and Credo/DustPhotonics, highlighting AI infrastructure deals. - Jesse Landry calls out Molex's roughly $430M acquisition of Teramount, noting data‑movement bottlenecks in AI infra. - The chatter shows investor focus on hardware layers and bottlenecks inside the AI stack, shifting strategic priorities ( ).
Artificial intelligence deal chatter has moved down the stack, from model companies to the hardware that moves data between chips. (marvell.com) Marvell completed its acquisition of Celestial AI on Feb. 2, 2026, after announcing the deal on Dec. 2, 2025 at an upfront value of about $3.25 billion in cash and stock, with additional stock tied to revenue milestones. Celestial AI’s Photonic Fabric is designed for optical links inside packages, systems and racks in data centers. (marvell.com) Credo said on April 13, 2026 that it agreed to acquire DustPhotonics, an Israeli silicon photonics company, for $750 million in cash plus about 0.92 million Credo shares, with the deal disclosed in an 8-K filed the same day. Credo said DustPhotonics expands its optical lineup across 800G, 1.6T and 3.2T connectivity products. (credosemi.com) Molex added another data point on April 15, 2026, announcing an agreement to acquire Teramount, an Israeli developer of fiber-to-chip links for co-packaged optics. Molex said Teramount’s detachable, passive-alignment technology is aimed at faster data transfer for artificial intelligence, cloud and 5G workloads. (molex.com) Co-packaged optics puts optical connections next to the processor instead of farther away on a separate module, cutting the electrical distance that signals must travel. Silicon photonics uses light on chips to move more data with less power than traditional copper links over the same path. (molex.com) That engineering problem has become a business problem as AI clusters grow larger and faster. Celestial AI said its mission was to break the “data movement barrier” holding AI systems back, and Credo told investors the DustPhotonics deal would deepen its optical interconnect portfolio and expand its addressable market. (celestial.ai) (credosemi.com) The recent transactions also show buyers trying to own more of the link between compute and networking. Marvell bought an optical interconnect platform, Credo bought silicon photonics chip technology, and Molex moved on fiber-to-chip packaging for co-packaged optics. (marvell.com) (sec.gov) (teramount.com) The numbers span very different scales, but they point in the same direction. Marvell’s Celestial AI deal started at $3.25 billion, Credo’s DustPhotonics agreement started at $750 million, and Molex said its Teramount acquisition followed Koch Disruptive Technologies’ lead investment in Teramount’s $50 million Series A financing in 2025. (marvell.com) (sec.gov) (molex.com) The thread running through all three deals is simple: AI spending is pulling acquirers toward the parts of the system that keep chips fed with data. In April 2026, the busiest map in technology, media and telecom dealflow is not consumer internet or software, but the plumbing inside the AI data center. (marvell.com) (credosemi.com) (molex.com)
