Marvell's AI Bet: Will NVLink and UALink Drive Custom Chip Wins?

Marvell Technology MRVL is enhancing its role in artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure by expanding its custom chip capabilities. Marvell continues to integrate its custom compute platform with new components that improve performance, scalability, and integration across large-scale systems.

During the first quarter of fiscal 2026, Marvell reported record Data Center revenues of $1.44 billion, up 76% year over year. The growth was driven by the rapid scaling of custom AI silicon. To support continued momentum, Marvell recently announced multiple strategic additions to its custom silicon platform.

In May 2025, Marvell partnered with NVIDIA to offer NVIDIA’s NVLink Fusion technology to customers deploying Marvell’s custom cloud platform silicon. This enables custom XPUs to connect with NVIDIA’s rack-scale hardware architecture. Marvell noted that its custom silicon with NVIDIA NVLink Fusion offers its customers greater flexibility and options in developing next-generation AI infrastructure. This announcement reflects that MRVL's custom chips are gaining credibility and traction, even among companies like NVIDIA.

In the same month, Marvell introduced its new multi-die packaging solution, which is built on its proprietary interposer technology. The solution is already in production for a customer-specific XPU program. The platform enables more efficient die-to-die interconnect, lowers power consumption, enhances yield and lowers product cost.

Earlier this month, Marvell introduced a third addition to its custom platform — Ultra Accelerator Link (UALink) scale-up solution. The solution delivers an open-standards-based scale-up interconnect platform with high compute utilization and low latency. UALink is paired with Marvell custom silicon capabilities. This allows compute vendors to build solutions, including custom accelerators with UALink controllers and custom switches, enabling optimal performance for rack-scale AI.

Together, these additions support Marvell’s push to enable full rack-level custom infrastructure. Moreover, with new components entering production, Marvell is positioned to play a crucial role in powering the next generation of large-scale AI systems.

How Competitors Fare Against MRVL

Advanced Micro Devices AMD is advancing its rack-level AI solutions through its acquisition of ZT Systems. This acquisition enables Advanced Micro Devices to reduce deployment time for hyperscalers by combining AMD’s CPUs, GPUs, and networking components. This move also enables Advanced Micro Devices to accelerate time to market for its OEM and ODM partners.

Broadcom AVGO is aggressively scaling its AI networking portfolio. In the second quarter of fiscal 2025, AVGO’s AI networking revenues jumped 170% year over year and now comprise 40% of its total AI semiconductor revenues. Broadcom also introduced the Tomahawk 6 switch with a 102.4 Terabits per second switch capacity. It is designed to enable AI clusters of over 100,000 AI accelerators to be deployed in 2 tiers. This move enables Broadcom to achieve better performance in training its next-generation frontier models through lower latency, higher bandwidth and lower power.

MRVL’s Price Performance, Valuation and Estimates

Shares of Marvell Technology have plunged 31.9% year to date against the Electronics - Semiconductors industry’s growth of 6.4%.

MRVL YTD Price Return Performance

From a valuation standpoint, Marvell Technology trades at a forward price-to-sales ratio of 7.36X, lower than the industry’s average of 8.15X.

MRVL Forward 12-Month P/S Ratio

The Zacks Consensus Estimate for MRVL’s fiscal 2026 and fiscal 2027 earnings implies year-over-year growth of 77.71% and 27.73%, respectively. The earnings estimates for fiscal 2026 and fiscal 2027 have been revised upward in the past 30 days and seven days, respectively. 

MRVL currently carries a Zacks Rank #3 (Hold). You can see the complete list of today’s Zacks #1 Rank (Strong Buy) stocks here.

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This article originally published on Zacks Investment Research (zacks.com).

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