Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, JSA, and Latham & Watkins advised on US company Marvell Technology’s USD3.25 billion acquisition of...

Niobium expands leadership team with key hires in Product and Finance as it builds toward an encrypted cloud platform. March 10, 2026/in Niobium Company adds accomplished veterans from Groq and Celestial AI as it advances a vision for cloud computing where data never needs to be decrypted. DAYTON, Ohio - March 10, 2026 9:00 AM EST - Niobium, a leader in hardware acceleration for fully homomorphic encryption (FHE), today announced the addition of two senior executives to its leadership team: John Barrus as Vice President of Product, formerly of Groq, and Evan Scott as Vice President of Finance, formerly of Celestial AI. The appointments come as Niobium reaches a major milestone in its FHE Accelerator development program, a platform that could fundamentally change how sensitive data is processed in the cloud, enabling organizations to run computations on encrypted data without ever exposing it. The company recently announced a manufacturing partnership with SEMIFIVE and Samsung Foundry to bring the world's first commercially viable FHE accelerator ASIC to production, designed to enable encrypted computation at speeds practical for real-world applications. John Barrus joins Niobium from Groq. As Groq's VP of Product, Barrus helped build one of the most talked-about AI inference companies in the industry, which has been recently acquired by NVIDIA. Before Groq, Barrus held leadership roles at Amazon and Google, where he helped bring Google's Cloud TPU to market, a platform that has since grown into a multi-billion-dollar business. "When I first engaged with Groq in 2018, it was obvious what the team should be building and why it would matter," said Barrus. "I have the same conviction about Niobium. The hardware opportunity in FHE is real, the team is exceptional, and the timing is right." Evan Scott joins Niobium from Celestial AI, where he served as Senior Director of Finance and led financial planning and analysis, and managed investor reporting during a period of rapid growth in AI infrastructure, including the company's $250 million Series C-1 financing. Scott also helped guide the company through a major strategic transaction culminating in its acquisition by Marvell. His experience building financial infrastructure and managing investor relations at a fast-moving semiconductor startup gives him a strong foundation as Niobium advances toward commercial deployment and scales its operations. "What stood out to me immediately was the strength of the leadership team and the caliber of engineers building this technology," said Scott. "Niobium is tackling one of the hardest problems in computing - making encrypted computation practical - and the opportunity to help bring that to market was incredibly compelling." Building the CUDA of encrypted computation. Today, organizations that move sensitive workloads to the cloud must trust that their data will be protected during processing when the data is decrypted and exposed. This creates risk across industries from healthcare and financial services to government and AI, and it remains one of the biggest unresolved challenges in cloud computing. Niobium is addressing the two barriers that currently hinder broad FHE adoption: performance and usability. While the industry has long recognized the computational demands of FHE, Niobium's approach goes beyond raw acceleration. The company is developing higher-level software frameworks designed to make encrypted computing accessible to a far broader developer community, mirroring the role CUDA played in democratizing GPU-accelerated computing for NVIDIA. "If you want to know where next-generation computing is headed, follow the talent. John saw the AI inference wave early at Groq. Evan helped navigate Celestial AI through a landmark acquisition. The fact that they're both here tells a story about where encrypted computation is going," said Kevin Yoder, Niobium CEO. "We're building more than just an accelerator. We're building the platform that makes encrypted computation something that developers can actually use. John and Evan have done this before, at scale, and that's exactly what this stage demands." About Niobium. Niobium is building the first dedicated hardware platform designed to advance fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) into commercial applications. FHE keeps data encrypted even during computation, mathematically guaranteeing privacy. Niobium is headquartered in Dayton, Ohio, with offices in Portland, Oregon, and San Francisco, California. More information is available at niobiummicrosystems.com.

Marvell Industry Analyst Day: Celestial AI lands a Hyperscaler Win. Celestial AI CEO Highlights Major Hyperscaler Win and Photonic Fabric Adoption at Marvell Industry Analyst Day Celestial AI CEO Dave Lazovsky used Marvell's Industry Analyst Day to spotlight the company's most significant commercial milestone to date, announcing that a top-tier hyperscaler has selected Celestial AI's photonic connectivity for its next-generation AI processors, with co-designed technology now moving into volume manufacturing. Lazovsky said this engagement represents one of the industry's earliest large-scale transitions from copper to optical XPU interconnect inside AI systems. Lazovsky told analysts that AI workloads are evolving faster than the data-center infrastructure designed to support them. With compute no longer the bottleneck, he said hyperscalers now face acute constraints around bandwidth, latency, power, and cost. Next-generation fabrics require sub-200-nanosecond link latency, at least a 4 - 5x reduction in power consumption, and a cost structure of roughly five to eight cents per gig per side. Celestial AI's Photonic Fabric, he said, uniquely matches these requirements while enabling switch-class bandwidth at the XPU level - 16 Tbps per direction per chiplet, or 64 Tbps bidirectional in a single package. He emphasized that the hyperscaler deployment provides a first-mover advantage as system designers shift from electrical traces to optical connectivity earlier in the architecture. Customer volumes for chiplet attach can reach hundreds of thousands of units per quarter, creating a substantial near-term revenue engine, while Celestial AI's optical HBM-pooling design allows memory to be extended tens of meters away from compute while maintaining the latency budgets required for large-scale training workloads. - Celestial AI's Photonic Fabric spans chiplet-level XPU connectivity and optical memory interconnect for HBM pooling. "The timing of this combination couldn't be better," Lazovsky said. "Latency translates directly to revenue for our customers, and Photonic Fabric delivers the bandwidth density, energy efficiency, and cost structure required for AI at scale." Earlier this month: Marvell agreed to acquire Celestial AI in a definitive deal valued at approximately $3.25 billion upfront, with contingent equity that could lift the total above $5 billion based on revenue milestones. The acquisition targets Celestial AI's Photonic Fabric optical interconnect platform, which delivers 16 Tbps chiplets designed for next-generation scale-up fabrics connecting XPUs across packages, systems, and racks. Marvell expects the business to begin contributing revenue in the second half of fiscal 2028, reaching a $500 million annualized run rate by the fourth quarter of fiscal 2028 and $1 billion by the fourth quarter of fiscal 2029. The deal positions Marvell to extend its connectivity portfolio - including Ethernet switching, DCI optics, custom silicon, and its UALink-based scale-up roadmap - into the short-reach optical domain that AI systems increasingly require as copper reaches limits in bandwidth, latency, power, and thermal reach. Celestial AI's Photonic Fabric chiplets integrate electrical and optical components in a compact form factor and can be co-packaged directly with XPUs and scale-up switches, enabling optical links to originate from the center of the die and freeing die-edge area for additional HBM capacity. The company reports active engagements with multiple hyperscalers preparing multi-rack AI clusters that will transition high-speed XPU links from copper to optics. Under the agreement, Marvell will pay $1 billion in cash and issue approximately 27.2 million shares valued at $2.25 billion based on the 10-day volume-weighted average price. Earn-outs totaling another ~27.2 million shares will be paid if Celestial AI achieves at least $500 million in cumulative revenue by the end of Marvell's fiscal 2029 (one-third of the earn-out), and up to $2 billion in cumulative revenue by the same date (full earn-out). Closing is expected in the first quarter of calendar 2026, subject to regulatory review.