Marvell Technology and Lumentum Holdings secured the backing of Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang before reaching a merger agreement valued at nearly $103 billion. According to people familiar with the matter, Marvell CEO Matthew Murphy and Lumentum CEO Michael Hurlston called Jensen Huang to seek his input before the deal was announced. Huang's endorsement underscores Nvidia's encouragement of consolidation among its key suppliers, as demand for faster optical connectivity has become a bottleneck in the construction of large-scale data centers. Nvidia, a major supplier of chips for training and running large language models, invested $2 billion each in Marvell and Lumentum earlier this year.