Marvell and Lumentum agreed to combine
The two companies announced the agreement on 2 November. Lumentum stockholders receive a fixed exchange ratio of 4.500 Marvell shares for each Lumentum share, representing about $1,132 per share, and the transaction carries an implied enterprise value of $115 billion for Lumentum. That is a premium of about 23.9%, based on each company's unaffected closing price on 28 October, the last trading day before market speculation began. Marvell stockholders would hold roughly 67% of the combined company on a fully diluted basis. Lumentum brings high-performance lasers, optical transceivers, optical circuit switching and indium phosphide manufacturing.
Copper is the constraint. A copper lane holds a 400 Gbps signal over about 1.25 metres, and that reach halves each time per-lane speed doubles, The Register reports; the rack-scale systems now being designed will rely on optical links to stitch hundreds or thousands of GPUs into one compute domain. Jensen Huang has said Nvidia avoided optics on its first Blackwell racks in 2024 because they would have added 20 kW to a system already drawing 120 kW. For a European buyer, the question to put to a hosting provider is which interconnect generation its 2027 racks will use. The deal needs stockholder and regulatory approvals and is not expected to close until the first half of calendar 2028.
Torvalds says AI-found kernel fixes are arriving in the merge window
Linus Torvalds released Linux 7.4-rc1 on 1 November and called it "a *BIG* merge window" — almost 20,000 commits against a more common ~15,000. He wrote that he is "*much* happier with the flood of AI triggered work going into the merge window" than with it "showing up mainly as extra fixes during the -rc period", and called that shift "a much healthier model". The release is, in his words, full of fixes for issues found by AI, and AI has suggested many patches, which are often rewritten. "A full third of the patch is just AMD GPU register offsets and bit masks."
In a note quoted by The Register on 23 October, Torvalds said he wants "competent people to use AI as a tool" but would "discourage the drive-by patches". For a team that tracks long-term-support kernels, that work now lands in the merge window rather than across the -rc series. Torvalds added that expectations of 7.4 as the next LTS release may account for a small part of the merge window's size.
Quick Hits
- Palantir's US commercial revenue surpassed its US government revenue for the first time. Third-quarter revenue was $2.31 billion, up 96%. US commercial was $984 million, up 148%, against $953 million from US government work.
- India's electronics ministry published its DEPA for AI Training handbook on 31 October, setting out purpose-bound collaboration in controlled computing environments. "The model travels to the data, rather than the data travelling to the model," its principal scientific adviser said.
- Google ran its Gemma 4 model on a TPU in orbit. The Suncatcher prototype satellite downlinked a haiku over Svalbard, announced on 30 October. A pair of interconnected satellites is to be tested next year.
- xAI and MZX Tech must face an NAACP Clean Air Act suit over turbines in Southaven, Mississippi. Judge Debra M. Brown denied their motion to dismiss on 30 October, holding the turbines are not "mobile sources" under Mississippi's SIP.