There’s a very interesting spot to occupy in the AI chip race. It’s in the middle, where you can win because your value is useful to everyone. Marvell CEO Matt Murphy thinks his company has found that corner office.
On CNBC’s “Mad Money” on Sept. 8, Murphy called Marvell “the Switzerland of this entire market.” Why? It can work across different GPU and XPU platforms.
In fact, I looked at the numbers, and it turns out Marvell has outperformed every major chip stock over the past year. It is up 239%, while Broadcom fell 1.65%, Nvidia gained 23.44%, and AMD surged 215.66%.
The number validates that Murphy has actually been cooking, and it’s not food. He claims he has been doing it quietly, for the better part of a decade. And the gem behind the rally? Trust.
In this market, these large hyperscale customers and the ecosystem around it, it’s really based on trust.
Murphy continued. “I think trust has been a huge part of our brand and our credibility.”
Also Read: Marvell Technology Inc. Latest News and Stories
The meaning of Marvell’s trust in the hyperscaler chip business
Murphy was describing a very specific competitive dynamic that determines who gets the most valuable chip contracts in the world.
We all know the hyperscalers’ elephants in the house — Amazon (AMZN), Microsoft (MSFT), Alphabet (GOOGL), and Meta Platforms (META) — are designing custom AI chips in-house and seeking semiconductor partners who can execute on designs so complex that a single delay can set back an entire data center buildout by months.
They can’t afford to give that work to someone they don’t fully believe in, right?
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Murphy broke it down fully to CNBC: “Can you trust the engineering team and the company is going to deliver the chip? Can you trust the management team that they’re going to shoot you straight? Can you trust that the capacity and the supply is going to be there, and can you trust the CEO at the end of the day?”
That’s four distinct layers of trust. Building all four simultaneously with the world’s most demanding technology customers honestly takes years, effort, and trust.
Murphy actually suggested it took roughly a decade. And we all can see the payoff is now showing up in the revenue projections.
Marvell’s revenue revision that reframes the whole story
There is a rally I want you to notice. In December 2025, Marvell expected about $10 billion in revenue for fiscal 2026 and $13.5 billion in fiscal 2027. Combined two-year outlook: $23.5 billion.
Murphy told Jim Cramer in the CNBC interview that Marvell now expects approximately $12 billion this fiscal year and $18 billion next year. Combined two-year outlook: $30 billion.
Notice that they’ve gone from $23.5 billion last Dec. 2025 to $30 billion. And we are only in September 2026. Clearly, things have gone well. In roughly nine months, the two-year revenue outlook expanded by $6.5 billion.
Related: Marvell’s $120B AI deal came with an unexpected catch
The driver is data centers. Marvell generated roughly $2 billion in data-center revenue in 2023. Murphy now expects more than $15 billion of next year’s $18 billion projection to come from data centers.
“Basically, we’ve come in a full year and taken the company from $2 billion and change in data center revenue in 2023 to $15-16 billion next year,” he said.
The most recent quarter confirms the trajectory is real. Marvell reported record Q2 fiscal 2027 revenue of $2.74 billion, up 37% year over year (YoY), with data-center revenue accelerating to 46% YoY growth, according to Marvell’s Q2 earnings statement.
Non-GAAP EPS came in at $0.94, beating the $0.87 consensus estimate. Q3 guidance calls for approximately $3.15 billion in revenue at the midpoint.
Why being the “Switzerland” of AI is a competitive moat
Murphy’s Switzerland description — “We work with everybody” — is more strategically meaningful than it sounds. It’s actually not a marketing line.
Most custom silicon stories are binary. You win a major hyperscaler customer, or you don’t. Marvell avoids that binary by serving all four major U.S. hyperscalers simultaneously on custom silicon while also selling optical connectivity products broadly across the industry, according to Murphy’s comments to CNBC.
The optical business matters because as AI clusters scale, the networks connecting those clusters become as important as the chips themselves.
The Google partnership confirmed in August crystallizes the opportunity. Marvell signed a multi-year technology supply agreement with Google, which had long been considered Broadcom’s most important custom chip customer, according to TheStreet’s reporting.
Under the agreement, Marvell could issue warrants representing about 6.5% of the company if cumulative revenue with Google reaches $120 billion.
“What it really says at a high level is we have customers that want to partner with Marvell,” Murphy said. “They want to be part of our success.”
Cramer also raised Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang’s suggestion that Marvell could eventually become a trillion-dollar company. Murphy deflected gracefully: “We’re just focused on driving the business, creating the value for shareholders along the way.”
MRVL share performance ranks eighth among S&P 500 companies by year-to-date return, up 167.47% according to Slickcharts.
All eyes are now on the next major fundamental day on Oct. 6, when Marvell presents a new four- to five-year roadmap at its investor day.
If the trajectory Murphy described holds, that event will validate the current valuation or even set a new one.
Related: Morgan Stanley points to the good news in Marvell’s data centers
