Marvell Technology (NASDAQ:MRVL) executives highlighted strong recent bookings, expanding multi-year customer planning, and a broader push into scale-up networking during a JPMorgan Virtual Fireside Chat at CES. CEO and Chairman Matt Murphy, joined by SVP of Investor Relations Ashish Saran, said current demand signals run counter to investor concerns about a near-term slowdown in AI-driven data center spending.
Management pushes back on “AI bubble” worries, points to bookings and multi-year planning
Murphy said Marvell is seeing “the exact opposite of a slowdown,” citing record corporate bookings in the company’s second and third fiscal quarters and a fourth-quarter pace that was running ahead of the prior quarter as of about a month earlier. He added that the company has been “laying in the backlog” with firm orders to support growth expectations for fiscal 2027, and that bookings remained strong through the holiday period.
Data center growth assumptions: optics outperforming CapEx; custom ramps in fiscal 2028
Murphy attributed Marvell’s data center growth trajectory to years of portfolio reshaping and investment, referencing acquisitions including Aquantia (2019), Inphi, Innovium, and more recent deals, alongside what he described as a “$2 billion-plus R&D machine.” He said Marvell’s data center business has grown roughly threefold since calendar 2023.
He also said the company, based on its fourth-quarter forecast, is expected to grow revenue more than 40% year over year, noting that this growth rate includes the impact of an automotive business divestiture.
Looking ahead, Murphy reiterated a framework he previously shared for fiscal 2027 and fiscal 2028, using assumed cloud CapEx growth as a baseline and then layering in expected outperformance in key product areas. For the coming fiscal year (calendar 2026 / fiscal 2027), Murphy outlined expectations including optics growing above cloud CapEx, custom business growth of about 20%, and switching, storage, and other data center products growing about 15%. He also said the “comms and other” bucket is expected to grow about 10% even with the divestiture.
For fiscal 2028 (calendar 2027), Murphy said Marvell’s base case assumes about 20% cloud CapEx growth, with optics continuing to outperform and a more substantial ramp in custom silicon. He walked through a math-based explanation for how the custom business could “double” year over year in fiscal 2028, pointing to a stronger second-half setup in fiscal 2027, an expected custom exit run rate of about $2 billion, and incremental contributions from what he described as “XPU attached” sockets. Murphy said Marvell has 15 different sockets expected to go into production starting this year and continuing into subsequent years, and he indicated that NIC and CXL categories could each be “a billion plus” in the year after, while also referencing another larger, episodic XPU program that is “tracking and we’re planning for production.”
Scale-up networking becomes a major strategic focus, supported by M&A and internal roadmaps
Murphy described scale-up, or rack-scale, networking as a major opportunity and said Marvell is pursuing an end-to-end approach across interconnect and switching. He pointed to progress in copper interconnect products—active electrical cables (AECs) and PCIe retimers—benefiting from an industry transition from NRZ to PAM modulation. He said Marvell’s copper-related AEC and retimer businesses are expected to “double plus” in the coming year, and later specified that retimer plus AEC revenue is expected to be in the “multi-hundred-million-dollar range” in fiscal 2027.
Marvell is also positioning for a longer-term transition from copper scale-up interconnect to optics. Murphy said the acquisition of Celestial adds photonic fabric capability, which he characterized as important for integrating photonics on both the ASIC/XPU side and the scale-up switching side. Saran added that Marvell believes it can be among the first to enable optical interconnect in scale-up at high volume with tier-one customers, calling the company’s ability to offer the “entire solution” a differentiator.
On switching for scale-up, Murphy said Marvell is investing organically in an industry standard called UALink, with tape-out and sampling plans articulated for next year. He said the company is also working on Ethernet scale-up networking (ESUN). Murphy said the acquisition of XConn Technologies is intended to accelerate these efforts, bringing in PCIe switching, CXL switching, and what he described as a veteran fabric-switching engineering team. He also said XConn comes with existing design wins and revenue, and that the team’s expertise should extend Marvell’s roadmap over multiple years. In response to a question about portfolio fit, Murphy said the acquisition fills out Marvell’s CXL offering—where Marvell already has strength in expanders and accelerators—by adding switching and pooling capabilities.
Ethernet switching momentum and roadmap cadence
Murphy said Marvell’s scale-out Ethernet switching business, built from the Innovium acquisition, has ramped successfully from its 12.8T product to the 51.2T Teralynx 10 platform, with the 51.2T product ramping “very aggressively” into production this year. He also said a 100T product is coming soon. Murphy and Saran both indicated that revenue growth in switching has been accompanied by an expansion in the customer base, while also noting that XConn enables more parallel execution across scale-out and scale-up switching initiatives.
Custom silicon: management emphasizes programmability and order visibility
On custom ASICs and XPUs, Murphy pushed back on the idea that AI accelerators built as custom silicon are “fixed function,” arguing that industry-wide deployment would not be occurring at scale if devices could not adapt to evolving models and workloads. Saran added that the growth of custom products despite rapid changes in AI models is a “proof point” that these devices are programmable and flexible.
Murphy also said that for a key follow-on XPU program, Marvell already had purchase orders and backlog supporting the growth outlook discussed previously, and that order coverage and business momentum remained consistent, with his view becoming “incrementally more positive and bullish” across product categories.
Supply chain: long-term planning and strategic partnerships
Asked about potential constraints—such as advanced-node wafer supply and packaging—Murphy said the semiconductor industry has been constrained in various ways for the last five to six years. He described Marvell’s shift away from a more tactical supply chain approach toward long-term strategic partnerships, including investments in substrates, backend capacity, and CoWoS. Murphy said Marvell provides a five-year supply forecast to strategic partners and updates it annually, and that earlier forecasts for 2026 were “about what we need,” though product mix has shifted. While acknowledging that bottlenecks can arise, he said Marvell’s outlook assumes the company will have “line of sight to go get what we need.”
In closing remarks, Murphy said Marvell’s custom XPU ramp that began in 2023–2024 has moved “in motion now,” and he encouraged investors to focus on what he called an “incredible networking interconnect franchise” that is still in early growth stages. He said Marvell plans to drive an aggressive year of product development and customer engagement in 2026, spanning scale-up and scale-out networking, AECs, retimers, switching, interconnect, and optical technologies.
About Marvell Technology (NASDAQ:MRVL)
Marvell Technology Group is a global semiconductor company that designs and develops integrated circuits and related software for data infrastructure, networking, storage and connectivity markets. The company’s product portfolio includes system-on-chip (SoC) solutions, Ethernet physical-layer transceivers (PHYs), switch and switch silicon, optical interconnect components, storage controllers, and security processors. Marvell’s technology is used to enable high-performance data centers, carrier networks, enterprise and cloud storage, as well as connectivity in automotive and industrial applications.
Founded in 1995 and headquartered in Santa Clara, California, Marvell has grown through both organic development and strategic acquisitions to broaden its capabilities across networking and data interconnect.
