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 readacross from Cisco, which is surging after reporting an earnings beat and a boost to guidance.
Ahead of its 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 center’s 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 on 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 EPS 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,” whilst 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 7 analysts rating it as Hold. Late Tuesday. Advanced Micro Devices disclosed that it had increased its small stake in Marvell, worth ~$6.5 million at the end of March, in a quarterly filing.
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 buildout, but Marvell focuses more on custom chips, while Cisco is exposed to the buildout of switching and routing for AI/GPU cluster networks.