Marvell raises its AI chip forecast and Wall Street likes what it hears

Marvell just told investors its custom AI chip business is growing faster than it previously said, and Wall Street responded by pushing price targets above $300.

Marvell Technology held its investor day on October 6, and the headline number was hard to miss: the company now sees its total addressable market reaching about $400 billion by calendar 2030. CEO Matt Murphy told investors Marvell now expects about $20 billion in fiscal 2028 revenue, up from the $18 billion outlook it gave in August, and more than $12 billion in fiscal 2029 custom revenue, above its prior target of more than $10 billion. The stock jumped about 6% on the news, according to a Yahoo Finance report that cited TIKR data.

This isn't the company's first update this year. Marvell had already lifted its fiscal 2028 revenue outlook to about $18 billion in August, a $1.5 billion increase, after expanding its custom-silicon relationship with Google. The October investor day pushed that outlook higher again. Murphy has said the Google agreement "greatly increases the revenue opportunity for us in custom," with some of that revenue potentially starting as early as fiscal 2029.

Here's why that matters beyond the stock pop. Marvell builds custom chips, known as ASICs, for cloud giants designing their own AI hardware instead of buying only off-the-shelf GPUs from Nvidia. Marvell has been reported as a partner on Amazon's Trainium and Microsoft's Maia programs. That business has been Marvell's growth engine for two years, but it has also been volatile, dependent on a small number of giant customers making giant capital decisions. Investors have spent much of 2026 trying to figure out whether that dependency was a risk or a moat. Tuesday's event was Marvell's clearest answer yet: more customers, bigger pipeline, accelerating demand.

Wall Street moved higher after the October investor day. Barclays adjusted its price target on Marvell to $320 from $275, and analysts also focused on the new fiscal 2031 revenue framework of $70 billion to $90 billion. JPMorgan analysts, after meeting with Marvell management earlier in the cycle, told clients the company's Microsoft and Amazon custom chip programs remained on track, a detail reported by Sherwood News. That kind of confirmation matters more than the forecast itself, because it comes from analysts checking the pipeline against what hyperscaler customers are actually telling them.

None of this happens in a vacuum. Broadcom still dominates the custom AI chip market, with roughly 60% to 70% share depending on the estimate, and together the two companies control close to 95% of the custom ASIC co-design business, according to market tracking cited by Tom's Hardware. Broadcom's AI chip sales more than tripled to $16.7 billion in its latest reported quarter, and the company now expects about $115 billion in AI chip revenue in the fiscal year ending October 2027. Marvell is smaller, but it is growing into the same hyperscaler dual-sourcing trend that is lifting both companies: cloud providers increasingly want two chip partners, not one, so they are never stuck negotiating with a single supplier.

Frankly, the more interesting signal here isn't Marvell's stock price. It's what the guidance says about the broader AI infrastructure cycle. Skeptics have spent much of this year arguing that AI capital spending has to slow down eventually, that hyperscalers can't keep doubling chip orders forever. Marvell's updated numbers argue the opposite: demand for custom silicon specifically, the kind hyperscalers design to fit their own workloads rather than buy generically, is accelerating, not plateauing. Data center revenue already made up 79% of Marvell's total sales last quarter, up sharply from prior years, with 46% year-over-year growth in that segment.

There is a real execution risk sitting underneath all of this. The $20 billion fiscal 2028 target and the $12 billion-plus custom silicon milestone by fiscal 2029 both depend on hyperscaler capital spending staying elevated for years, on customer relationships deepening rather than diversifying away, and on Marvell actually shipping new chip generations on schedule. Chip design slips happen. Customers sometimes bring work in-house. But for now, the numbers Marvell put in front of investors on October 6 are bigger than the numbers it was using even a few months ago, and Wall Street moved its price targets to match.

Also read: Isomorphic Labs seeks funding at a valuation of at least $40 billion • NEAR Protocol rallied on AI agents then got hacked days later • TSMC's quarterly revenue jumped 51 percent as AI chip demand held firm

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