Marvell rises after strong Cisco earnings and price target hikes from Bank of America and Goldman Sachs analysts
Marvell Technology is enjoying another bump in its stock in early trading on Thursday following a series of target hikes from Wall Street analysts and strong read-across from Cisco, which is surging after reporting an earnings beat and boosting guidance.
Ahead of Marvell’s Q1 2027 earnings, expected to be released on May 27, Bank of America’s Vivek Arya raised the chipmaker’s price target to $200, from $125, while maintaining a “buy” rating on Wednesday. Calling the chipmaker a “top pick,” Arya highlighted the growing potential of AI data centers’ total addressable market, or future market size, as well as the role of AI networking — the hardware that powers data transfers between chips, optical components, and servers, which MRVL specializes in, and has been bringing in deals from big clients like Nvidia — in that expansion.
Goldman Sachs analysts took a more cautious stance in a Wednesday note, sticking to its “neutral” rating despite bumping its 12-month price target to $125, from $100 previously, as well as hiking its FY27/28 earnings-per-share estimates by 5%. The analysts, led by James Schneider, expect “upside to Marvell’s Datacenter business driven by higher hyperscaler CapEx, upside in its optical networking business, and a potential new Google partnership,” while noting the potential risk in a slowdown in overall AI spending, or the loss market share in custom compute, as reasons for the overall “neutral” rating.
MRVL is rated as “buy” by 86% of the 50 Wall Street analyst recommendations compiled by Bloomberg, with the remaining seven analysts rating it as “hold.” Late Tuesday, Advanced Micro Devices disclosed in a quarterly filing that it had increased its small stake in Marvell, worth ~$6.5 million at the end of March.
Elsewhere, Cisco jumped on a solid earnings beat and better-than-expected guidance. Both Cisco and Marvell are exposed to the network fabric around AI compute and the data center build-out, but Marvell focuses more on custom chips, while Cisco is exposed to the build-out of switching and routing for AI/GPU cluster networks.