Marvell’s Stock Has Doubled in 2026 — Analysts Are Still Playing Catch-Up
There is a peculiar problem happening on Wall Street right now: Marvell Technology has been raising its own revenue guidance three times in under six months, its stock has more than doubled year-to-date in 2026, and the average analyst price target still sits roughly 24% below where shares are currently trading. When a company outruns its own coverage, something interesting is happening beneath the surface.
Marvell (NASDAQ: MRVL) is not a household name, but it quietly occupies one of the most strategic positions in the AI infrastructure buildout. The company designs custom silicon chips called XPUs for major hyperscalers, along with the high-speed optical interconnects and networking hardware that allow massive data centers to move data without bottlenecks. Put simply: every AI cluster that gets built needs Marvell’s plumbing. That positioning is showing up in the numbers. Data center revenue hit $6 billion in fiscal 2026, up 46% year-over-year, and now accounts for 74% of total company revenue. Fiscal 2027 data center revenue is expected to grow another 40% — a guidance figure that itself was revised upward from 30% just three months earlier.
The catalyst that crystallized the bull case arrived in late March, when Nvidia announced a $2 billion investment in Marvell and integrated the company into its NVLink Fusion ecosystem — a rack-scale platform that allows hyperscalers to build semi-custom AI infrastructure fully compatible with Nvidia’s software stack. When the dominant force in AI chips decides to back a supplier with a multibillion-dollar check, it is worth paying attention. Stifel analysts subsequently raised their price target to $210 (a Street high), Citi lifted to $215, and Bank of America moved to $200. Yet consensus targets as a group have not fully caught up to where the stock is trading — a sign that models and earnings estimates are still being revised in real time.
For long-term investors, the Marvell thesis rests on three compounding engines. First, the interconnect business — where Marvell leads in the chip architecture powering 800-gigabit and 1.6-terabit optical transceivers — is expected to grow more than 50% this fiscal year, with all five major U.S. hyperscalers set to receive Marvell modules. Second, the custom silicon business is expected to at least double in fiscal 2028, led by a second major hyperscaler program ramping into high-volume production. Third, the recent Celestial AI acquisition added co-packaged optics capabilities with a clear milestone: $500 million annualized revenue by late 2027, doubling again by 2028.
The honest valuation debate is real: Marvell trades at roughly 44x NTM EV/EBITDA, well above Broadcom at 25x and Nvidia at 17x. That premium demands flawless execution across every product line. If any one thread slips, the stock faces multiple compression. But the bear case ignores something important — CEO Matt Murphy has raised full-year guidance three consecutive times in under six months, each time citing accelerating bookings, not aspirational projections. Management guided fiscal 2028 total revenue toward $15 billion and non-GAAP EPS of well over $5, explicitly noting the outlook is based on demand seen now and designs already in execution. Patient investors know the difference between a company pricing in hope and one pricing in backlog.
Q1 fiscal 2027 earnings arrive today after the close. The street expects $2.4 billion in revenue and EPS around $0.74 to $0.84. Marvell has beaten estimates in each of the last four quarters. Whether the stock reacts favorably or not in the short term, the underlying story — a fabless chip company that has secured a structural position in AI infrastructure while compounding its revenue guidance upward — is exactly the kind of business that long-term investors tend to look back on and wish they had understood earlier.
