By Rashika Singh
March 6 (Reuters) – Marvell Technology rose nearly 11% in early trading on Friday, as its upbeat multi-year forecast underscored booming demand for custom AI chips from large technology companies.
The jump could add more than $10 billion to the company’s market value if gains hold.
Marvell’s strong forecast comes on the heels of peer Broadcom projecting more than $100 billion in AI‑chip sales next year, signaling demand is spreading beyond AI bellwether Nvidia.
While both Marvell and Broadcom develop tech that enables high-speed connections between processors, Citigroup analysts said Marvell’s focus on linking chips more closely within a single system could expand its role as cloud companies build larger AI clusters.
Marvell said fiscal 2028 revenue will rise nearly 40% to about $15 billion, topping the $12.92 billion LSEG consensus. It also lifted its fiscal 2027 view to 30%‑plus growth, nearing $11 billion.
Capital spending on AI infrastructure by Alphabet, Meta, Microsoft and Amazon is expected to exceed $630 billion this year.
That outlay is boosting demand for Marvell’s custom ASICs and high‑speed interconnects that shuttle data between AI processors, memory and servers, and it is “still growing massively,” said the company’s president and COO, Chris Koopmans.
ASICs, or application‑specific integrated circuits, are chips tailored for a single function or custom workload, offering higher efficiency than general-purpose graphics processing units.
Analysts say Marvell is set for a strong run in its data‑center business, helped by rising demand for its digital signal processors that power high‑speed optical links in AI servers and a multiyear ramp‑up in custom AI processors running ahead of expectations.
Revenue in the data-center segment, its largest business, rose 21% to $1.65 billion, compared with estimates of $1.64 billion.
Marvell trades at a 12-month forward price-to-earnings ratio of 19.99, compared with Broadcom’s 25.31, LSEG data showed.
(Reporting by Rashika Singh in Bengaluru; Editing by Maju Samuel and Sriraj Kalluvila)
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