Marvell Stock Is Up 180% This Year: BofA Says the Real AI Opportunity Is 5 Times Bigger

Marvell Technology Inc. (NASDAQ: MRVL ) stock has nearly tripled this year, up about 180% since the start of January. If you think the rally has gone too far, Bank of America is telling you to think twice. On Wednesday, BofA analyst Vivek Arya hosted Chief Executive Matt Murphy and Chief Financial Officer Dan Durn at an investor lunch in New York.

He came away convinced that Marvell is still underestimating how big its artificial intelligence opportunity could get. His math says the market for custom AI chips, plus the components wired to them, could reach about $300 billion by 2030. That is five to six times the roughly $55 billion Marvell itself sized for 2028 back in June 2025. Arya reiterated his Buy rating and $365 price target, about 54% above current levels, and named Marvell his favorite AI networking stock.

93 Friday morning. The Chips Around the Chip The biggest opportunity lies in what Marvell calls XPU attach. These are the connectivity and memory chips that sit next to every custom AI processor, or XPU, that cloud giants design in-house. Management sees this business as much harder to displace than the processors themselves, Arya said.

S. cloud providers. Each processor could carry one, two or more of these chips, priced at $500 to $1,500 apiece. The storage controllers Marvell sold in the past fetched about $50.

Arya’s estimate assumes around 30 million custom processors ship in 2030. On that basis he sees a $60 billion to $65 billion market, and Marvell could capture about $30 billion of it at a 40% to 50% share. By comparison, the company’s own guidance calls for more than $1 billion in attach sales in 2027 and about $3 billion to $4 billion in 2028. A ‘Very Conservative’ Processor Outlook On the processors themselves, Arya forecasts a custom market of $350 billion to $400 billion by 2030.

That would be about a quarter of total AI chip spending. High-bandwidth memory, the stacked chips that make up roughly 35% of a processor’s cost, is not something Marvell sells. Strip it out and about $240 billion is left for Marvell to chase, nearly five times its prior 2028 estimate. A 5% to 7% share would translate into $12 billion to $17 billion in sales.

com Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN ), Marvell’s lead customer, should keep growing its orders every year, management said. Microsoft Corp. (NASDAQ: MSFT ) is set to begin ramping next year.

Optics, Google and the Earnings Math Scale-up optics are the light-based links that tie processors together inside a server rack. Arya said Marvell could win in this market regardless of how customers choose to build those links. Management sees each approach as a new revenue stream that could grow from zero to more than $100 million. It is also a driver behind the recent raise in fiscal 2028 revenue guidance to about $18 billion.

Management also said a recent optics announcement from Qualcomm Inc. (NASDAQ: QCOM ) with Amazon has zero impact on Marvell’s optics business. It added that its deal with Google parent Alphabet Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOGL ) is all networking and connectivity, with no hit to existing products.

On earnings, Arya estimates Marvell could earn $14 a share by calendar 2028. That compares with $11 a share if custom chip sales stay at a baseline of $11 billion. Every extra $1 billion in sales could add 30 to 35 cents a share. All Eyes on Oct.

6 Marvell hosts its analyst day on Oct. 6, where management could update its market sizing, margins and earnings outlook. Image: Shutterstock