Marvell beat, raised guidance, and still broke. Q2 revenue rose 37% YoY to $2.74bn, while Q3 guidance of $3.15bn topped consensus. Yet MRVL fell 1.49% in regular trading and nearly 8% after hours. The issue was expectations: after a 184% YTD rally, investors wanted more, particularly from the Google custom-chip deal. Management indicated its bigger contribution comes in FY29 rather than FY28.
My pick is Broadcom. It offers the strongest combination of custom AI silicon, networking and optical exposure without relying on one part of the supply chain. Marvell still has an excellent growth story, but valuation and expectations make execution risk high.
For higher-risk upside, I prefer upstream optics such as Lumentum or Coherent. AI clusters need increasingly more optical connectivity regardless of which custom accelerator wins.
AVGO for quality, optics for torque, MRVL after expectations reset further.
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