Author: Ada, ShenChao TechFlow

On June 2, Marvell jumped 32.5% in a single day, closing at $290.79, setting a historical high. It has risen 265% over the past 12 months. The direct catalyst was Jensen Huang naming Marvell's custom ASIC and optical interconnect as the "core of AI data center architecture" at Computex.

It is already rare for a company to receive personal endorsement from the CEO of Nvidia at a conference. This company was founded in 1995 by Weili Dai and her husband Sehat Sutardja in their living room. Weili Dai is the youngest of the Dai siblings from Shanghai and one of the key figures in this family's 30-year legacy in the chip industry.

Older brother Weimin Dai is in Shanghai and is the chairman of VeriSilicon, also known as the "first A-share semiconductor IP stock." VeriSilicon is expected to have a market value of about 150 billion yuan in 2026, with AI ASIC orders hitting record highs for six consecutive quarters. Second brother Weijun Dai is currently a director and the general manager of the IP division at VeriSilicon, and his company, Silicon Perspective, was acquired by VeriSilicon in 2007 for $57.53 million.

Over the past thirty years, the six companies founded by the three Dai siblings include two public companies and four that were acquired. That’s only half the story. What’s really flowing beneath is the network of the chip industry woven after the marriage of the "Dai + Sutardja" families. From the United States to China, from EDA tools to factories or production lines for advanced chip packaging, from IP licensing to AI SuperNIC.

The Three Siblings Made Six Bets Over Thirty Years, Tuning in to the Rhythm Each Time

All three Dai siblings graduated from the University of California, Berkeley with degrees in electronic engineering, and their entrepreneurial timelines perfectly align with the rhythm of three paradigm shifts in the semiconductor industry.

In 1995, Weili Dai, her husband Sehat Sutardja, and Sehat's brother Pantas Sutardja founded Marvell in Silicon Valley, focusing on hard disk storage controllers with a pure fabless model. In the same year, older brother Weimin Dai founded Ultima in Silicon Valley to develop EDA tools. At that time, it was at the tail end of the PC boom, and the fabless design and tool-based EDA were core characteristics of the first major restructuring in the semiconductor industry, and the Dai family hit on both tracks. Ultima was acquired by Cadence in 2000, and Marvell went public in 2000.

In 1996, Weijun Dai co-founded Silicon Perspective, which developed digital implementation EDA and was acquired by Cadence for about $500 million in 2002. At the same time, older brother Weimin Dai turned his attention to China, returning to Shanghai in 2001 to establish VeriSilicon, betting on the "IP licensing + one-stop chip customization" model, providing semi-finished products to the nascent SoC design companies in China. In that same year, China joined the WTO, and local chip design companies surged from over 100 to thousands. VeriSilicon served as an ammunition supplier in this wave.

In 2007, Weijun Dai founded Vivante, developing embedded GPU IP, targeting automotive and IoT applications. This was just before the mobile internet took off when all terminals began to require graphical capabilities. In 2016, Weimin Dai's VeriSilicon acquired Vivante for $57.53 million, and Weijun Dai transitioned from Vivante CEO to general manager of the IP division at VeriSilicon. This internal acquisition connected the "China's IP leader + embedded GPU IP" to both lines.

In 2019, Weili Dai embarked on her third startup. After leaving Marvell, she co-founded Dream Big Semiconductor in Silicon Valley with Sehat and former Marvell executive Sohail Syed, focusing on chip open platforms and AI SuperNIC. In 2021, Weili Dai, Sehat, and Korean semiconductor veteran Han Byung Joon jointly founded Silicon Box in Singapore to develop advanced packaging factories for chips. Chiplets are the only way to continue improving single chip performance after the slowdown of Moore's Law, betting on the post-Moore era.

In August 2020, VeriSilicon went public on the STAR Market, raising 1.862 billion yuan and was crowned the "first semiconductor IP stock." In October 2025, Dream Big was acquired by Arm for $265 million in cash.

In thirty years, six companies, two public, four acquired by top buyers. This is an impressive report card, but looking solely at this report card misses the true other half of the story.

Industry Base Built by Two Families

The founding trio of Marvell in 1995 consisted of Weili Dai, Sehat Sutardja, and Sehat's brother Pantas Sutardja. Sehat was born in Jakarta, Indonesia, became a licensed radio technician at age 13, and earned a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Berkeley in 1988, where he met and married Weili Dai. From day one, Marvell was a product of the collaboration between the "Dai + Sutardja" families, not just a husband-and-wife startup.

This advantage has gradually amplified over thirty years.

The Dai family has deep roots in the Chinese semiconductor ecosystem. Older brother Weimin Dai's VeriSilicon is a leader in domestic IP and has partnered with SMIC and Huahong Grace to trace back to the establishment of SMIC. The first set of 0.18-micron standard cell libraries provided by VeriSilicon to SMIC solved the IP export control issues SMIC faced at the time. Second brother Weijun Dai has layered EDA, GPU IP, and IoT customer networks into China's local SoC ecosystem from Silicon Perspective to Vivante and back to VeriSilicon.

Looking at the Sutardja family, since the Marvell era, their engineering network has extended to Southeast Asia and Europe. In 2021, Weili Dai and Sehat, alongside Han Byung Joon, founded Silicon Box in Singapore. By early 2024, this company crossed the unicorn threshold and established a $2 billion advanced semiconductor packaging factory in Singapore's Tampines, and is building a new factory in Italy worth $3.6 billion. The two factories are supported by collaborations between the Singapore Economic Development Board and the Italian government’s industrial policies. This East Asia-Europe capacity scheduling ability is something the Dai family can open up, relying on their connections in mainland China.

What’s even more worth noting is the joint investment portfolio of the "Dai + Sutardja" families. Around the chiplet ecosystem, they have publicly verifiable investments or co-founded at least 15 companies: Alphawave specializes in high-speed SerDes interconnect IP and will be acquired by Qualcomm for $2.4 billion in December 2025; Expedera focuses on NPU IP; BlueCheetah works on UCIe bare chip interface IP; Nubis on optical interconnect; Ventana develops RISC-V server CPUs; FLC provides DRAM alternatives. These companies, along with the earlier mentioned VeriSilicon, Vivante, Dream Big, and Silicon Box, cover almost every layer needed in the chiplet era, including semiconductor IP, interconnect standards, packaging factories, and specialized computing chips. The two families have collectively built a comprehensive industrial base for the post-Moore era.

Replicating Marvell’s Rising Logic

What is the logic behind Marvell's recent surge?

Over the past year, the bottleneck of AI data centers has quietly shifted. The shortage of GPU computing power is the story for 2023-2024. By the second half of 2025, as large-scale training and inference ramp up, the real bottlenecks will become three things: custom ASICs (allowing customers not to have to continuously buy Nvidia's general GPUs), high-speed interconnects between chips, and advanced packaging capabilities that can fit these components into the same package.

Marvell has simultaneously tapped into the first two. They provide custom ASICs like TPUs for Google and Amazon, and use optical communication chips for high-speed transmission. This is the real reason for its 265% increase in a year and the reason Nvidia invested $2 billion in Marvell in March. Jensen Huang himself needs this main interconnect.

If we replace the same diagram with "Dai + Sutardja family" labels, the picture changes completely.

Dream Big is betting on a chiplet platform and AI SuperNIC (800 Gbps bandwidth for horizontal interconnect between GPUs). In October 2025, Arm announced a $265 million cash acquisition, clearly indicating its intention to upgrade from selling CPU IP to becoming a "full-stack architect for data centers," directly paralleling Nvidia's 2019 acquisition of Mellanox for $6.9 billion.

Alphawave focuses on high-speed SerDes interconnect IP and went public in London. On December 18, 2025, Qualcomm completed the acquisition for $2.4 billion. The Dai + Sutardja families are the second-largest shareholders of Alphawave, and Weili Dai realized about $237 million from this deal.

VeriSilicon operates domestically on "IP + one-stop ASIC customization," which is the same type of business Marvell does in the U.S., only the customer base has shifted to Chinese AI chip buyers like Alibaba, ByteDance, and Cambricon. In 2025, 73% of newly signed AI computing power orders were AI related, and in the first four months of 2026, 91% of the 8.24 billion yuan in new orders were AI-related. The market value is about 147.7 billion yuan (20.5 billion USD), equivalent to 8% of Marvell's scale, but with a steeper growth rate.

Silicon Box focuses on advanced packaging for chiplets. By early 2024, its valuation surpassed the $1 billion mark. This company doesn’t plan to go public or sell; it currently stands as a crucial piece for the Dai + Sutardja families in the key capacity layer of AI infrastructure.

In addition, there are more than ten other companies invested in or incubated, such as Expedera (NPU IP), BlueCheetah (UCIe bare chip interface IP), Nubis (optical interconnect), Ventana (RISC-V server CPU), FLC (DRAM alternative), all positioned at various points on the earlier mentioned "three bottlenecks of AI data centers."

Adding these assets together, conservatively estimating, the combined asset scale directly related to the current AI wave for both families exceeds $22 billion. This number won’t appear on any list because it is dispersed across five jurisdictions, four company types, and a dozen companies, but it exists.

From the perspective of family industry portfolios, the two families have placed at least six independent bets in this wave of AI data centers, each closely overlapping with the logic of Marvell's current surge. Marvell is their most prominent brand, but it is far from being their only ticket into this round.

The Third Path: Key Components at the Point of Standard Switching

Currently, there are two mainstream narratives in the AI semiconductor industry.

One is that platform-type big companies are reaping the rewards. Nvidia sells GPUs + the CUDA ecosystem, Broadcom and Marvell sell custom ASICs + interconnect, which is the domain of players with a market value over $150 billion.

The other is that independent ASIC startups are pursuing IPOs. Companies like Tenstorrent, Cerebras, Groq, and Etched bypass Nvidia to accelerate computing for specific scenarios, betting on establishing an alternative to GPUs.

The "Dai + Sutardja" family is taking the third path, which involves making key components of open standards, building their own packaging fabs, awaiting acquisition by major firms, or establishing themselves as the IP leader in China. This path is particularly logical in the chiplet era, as chiplets are the product of opposition to closed vertical integration; as long as standards are open, key IP + packaging capacity becomes a scarce commodity, and this route is much shorter than running an IPO on an entire independent ASIC.

However, the cost is also quite clear. This path is destined not to produce the next Nvidia. It allows the founders to exit multiple times with dignity and retain voice within the industry ecosystem for the long term, but it won’t place anyone on the final podium of AI infrastructure.

When Weili Dai founded Marvell with her husband in a living room in Silicon Valley in 1995, the company had little name recognition. Today, Marvell is a $254 billion AI data center star stock, and although most of the shares Weili Dai held 30 years ago have exited at various points, at the same time, she and her family still hold stakes in VeriSilicon, Silicon Box, Alphawave that have realized cash, Dream Big's cash from selling to Arm, and stakes in dozens of chiplet ecosystem companies.

Marvell is her most striking victory, but it is not her only victory, nor will it be her last.