Marvell Technology Targets $18B as AI Networking and Optics Fuel Growth

Marvell Technology NASDAQ: MRVL executives outlined the company’s expanding role in AI data-center infrastructure at Citi’s Global TMT Conference, pointing to growth opportunities in networking, optical connectivity, custom silicon and supply-chain-backed capacity expansion. Chairman and CEO Matt Murphy said Marvell’s strategy has centered on data centers since 2016, when data-center revenue accounted for 9% of the company’s fiscal 2017 revenue and was primarily tied to enterprise servers and storage. He said the company generated about $2.2 billion in data-center revenue in calendar 2023 and is targeting $15 billion to $16 billion next year.

“This has been a company we built brick by brick, year-by-year,” Murphy said, citing acquisitions, divestitures and organic investment. He said the company’s long-term focus on data infrastructure positioned it to benefit from the rise of generative AI.

Murphy identified scale-up networking as a significant future opportunity, combining switching platforms with near-packaged optics, or NPO, and co-packaged optics, or CPO. Marvell’s Teralynx switching platform, acquired through Innovium, is on track to exceed $1 billion in revenue, according to Murphy. He said the business had initially been projected to generate about $150 million in revenue.

The company is pursuing multiple networking standards, including Ethernet-based scale-up networking, UALink and NVIDIA’s NVLink. Murphy said Marvell’s electrical SerDes technology, optical offerings and switching portfolio allow it to pursue several approaches as the market develops. “There is a lot of shots on goal for us on scale up networking,” Murphy said. While NVLink currently dominates the market, he said the growing need to connect more GPUs and XPUs should create a new market over the next several years.

Marvell has invested in NPO technology for at least five years, Murphy said, including through its acquisition of Inphi. He added that the December 2025 acquisition of Celestial AI expanded Marvell’s CPO capabilities. The company expects NPO and CPO to coexist alongside copper connectivity rather than replace one another immediately. Murphy said Marvell expects revenue from broadband analog, NPO and CPO products to increase from effectively zero this year. The company previously forecast a $0 to $300 million contribution next year, but Murphy said the expected figure is now “much higher,” with networking and scale-up optics contributing to its increased outlook.

Marvell also expects continued growth in data-center interconnect, or DCI, as customers transition from 800G to 1.6T connectivity. Murphy said the company was first to announce 2-nanometer DSPs for 1.6T modules.