Marvell Technology used its investor day on Tuesday to tell Wall Street to think much bigger. The Santa Clara chipmaker raised its fiscal 2028 revenue target to about $20 billion, up from $18 billion, and for the first time published a fiscal 2031 revenue range of $70 billion to $90 billion. Shares rose about 6 percent on the day while rival Broadcom added about 4 percent, according to Reuters.
The new fiscal 2028 figure sits above the $18.2 billion consensus compiled by LSEG, and it marks the second increase in two months. In August, Marvell had already lifted its full-year outlook to about $18 billion from $16.5 billion. Chief executive Matt Murphy said the company now expects roughly $20 billion in fiscal 2028 revenue, about 67 percent growth from the approximately $12 billion expected in fiscal 2027, according to BigGo Finance.
The longer-range numbers are the ones straining belief. At the $80 billion midpoint, Marvell's fiscal 2031 target sits far above the $46.85 billion average estimate from four analysts polled by Visible Alpha, and more than 50 percent above the roughly $45 billion Piper Sandler had modeled before the event. Starting from the $8.2 billion Marvell booked in fiscal 2026, reaching $70 billion requires compounding at about 54 percent a year for five straight years. The $90 billion top end implies closer to 61 percent. The company grew 42 percent in fiscal 2026. It has never sustained anything close to the new pace.
Murphy's case rests on two engines: connectivity and custom silicon. He said the fiscal 2028 increase came "primarily because of connectivity," arguing that data centers have built out compute and memory but lack the links between them. He singled out scale-up optics, the connections inside server racks that are still copper today. The business is at zero this year, he said, and the shift to optical starts next year. Two quarters ago he sized it at $300 million. "It's gone up again," he told investors.
On custom chips, Marvell raised its fiscal 2029 target to more than $12 billion in revenue, up from more than $10 billion, from a base of about $1.5 billion in fiscal 2026. By fiscal 2031, management expects roughly $30 billion from custom products and $37.5 billion from interconnect at the $80 billion midpoint. Murphy put the custom silicon market at $235 billion by 2030, which would make Marvell's $30 billion target about a 13 percent share. "We've got customers there today," he said, calling the target "not a stretch." The company also expects earnings per share of at least $30 in fiscal 2031, against $3.07 in fiscal 2026, and pegs its total addressable market at roughly $400 billion by 2030, per Quantli's event summary.
The customer roster underwriting those numbers is the who's who of AI spending. Marvell disclosed in August a warrant arrangement with Google that could generate up to $120 billion in sales through fiscal 2033 if performance milestones are met. Under the structure, Google holds a warrant for about 59 million Marvell shares at $206.58 apiece, vesting in 240 tranches tied to $500 million increments of custom product purchases, according to TechTimes. Nvidia invested $2 billion in Marvell earlier this year as part of a strategic AI partnership. Murphy named Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, Alphabet, Meta, Nvidia, OpenAI and Anthropic among the company's largest customers. In the fiscal second quarter, revenue rose 37 percent from a year earlier to $2.739 billion, with data center revenue up 46 percent to $2.17 billion.
Wall Street responded with a wave of higher price targets. Needham raised its target to $400 with a Buy rating, citing a custom silicon market it expects to reach about $30 billion by fiscal 2031 at an 80 percent compound annual growth rate, via TradingView. Susquehanna lifted its target to $340 with a Positive rating, Cantor Fitzgerald to $350 while keeping a Neutral rating, and Evercore reportedly to about $433. Oppenheimer and RBC Capital went to $425, Piper Sandler to $400, and TD Cowen upgraded the stock to Buy with a $350 target, with analyst Sean O'Loughlin arguing Marvell's growth drivers have shifted toward its connectivity franchise and that concentration risk around custom accelerator programs has been "largely de-risked," per Stocktwits. Not everyone followed: Goldman Sachs kept a Neutral rating with a $270 target, implying downside.
The skeptic's case writes itself. Marvell trades at a price-to-earnings ratio near 95, and the stock has more than tripled this year, a run that leaves no room for execution slips. On Wednesday the shares pulled back below $280 after topping $300 a day earlier, as investors weighed whether the valuation bar had moved too far too fast, FXLeaders reported. The growth plan leans on a small group of hyperscale buyers whose capital spending can turn quickly, and on beating Broadcom in custom silicon. JPMorgan's analysis describes Broadcom as "anchored as the primary supplier" for Google's TPU program under a separate five-year agreement running through 2031, with Marvell's Google work covering adjacent silicon such as inference accelerators, networking and memory controllers rather than the core TPU.
Management's answer is that the forecast does not depend on landing a major new customer or a single breakthrough design win. "It took a long time to get this company on this path and to be a technology leader," president and chief operating officer Chris Koopmans told Reuters. "We have a track record of doing what we said we're going to do." The market's verdict, at 95 times earnings, is that the track record now has to be flawless.
Topics technologysemiconductorsartificial intelligencedata centers
