Welcome, and thank you for standing by. I would like to inform all participants that this conference call, as well as any Q&A, may be recorded. Where a company is presenting, any recording may also be posted on their website. Views and opinions expressed by any external speakers on this call are those of the speakers and not of JPMorgan. Parts of this conference call may be reproduced in JPMorgan research. If you have any objections, you may disconnect at this time. Unless otherwise permitted by internal JPMorgan policy, members of JPMorgan Investment and Corporate Banking are not permitted on this call and should disconnect now. I would now like to turn the call over to your host.
Great. Thank you. Good morning. Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Harlan Sur. I'm the semiconductor and semiconductor capital equipment analyst here at JPMorgan. Very pleased to be hosting Matt Murphy, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Marvell, here with us today. We also have Ashish Saran, Senior Vice President of Investor Relations at Marvell , here with us as well. Gentlemen, thank you for joining us this morning.
Thank you, Harlan.
Hey, thanks, Harlan. Thanks for hosting. We appreciate it.
No, I thank you very much for the support. It's been really, it's been an incredible transformation of the business over the past 36 months, right? As you are benefiting from the strong demand pull from accelerated compute and AI, your overall data center business is up 3x since calendar 2023. It's 75% of your total revenues. Your AI franchise is up greater than 6x by our estimates over that same period of time, right? You've blown through your AI targets set in April of last year for calendar 2024 and are on track to do the same for this year's targets as well. I thought that we would just sort of jump straight into the biggest question on investors' minds right now, which is the controversy around your lead customer's AI XPU program, right?
Investors, I think they're concerned that you're going to have a revenue hole in your custom XPU business next year because another company is claiming to have won the follow-on design to the program you're currently ramping. I understand that there are customer confidentiality issues at play here. Matt, maybe you can just help us clarify your plans, what do you expect next year for this program? Do you expect revenue growth, a revenue growth air pocket next year for this program?
Hey, great, Harlan. Again, thanks for hosting. Before I answer the question, maybe just set the stage. I think we're going to have a great discussion today. You alluded to some of the progress we made in data center and kind of the explosive growth we've seen. We're going to talk more about that. I want to cover the entire spectrum of the Marvell Technology opportunity within data center. Actually, I want to get to also talking about our communications and enterprise business after we get through that. I've had the opportunity since the earnings call to meet with a number of investors, attended a number of investor events, and gotten a perspective on what people are looking for, what people are thinking about, or concerned about.
One of the opportunities in this call was to sort of coalesce all that and address some of those things in a coordinated way. On top of that, which is very encouraging, since we had our call, we've been able to firm up a lot of our plans now for next year. We've seen very strong demand signals, Harlan, and we'll talk about that throughout the conversation today. I'm very excited about where things are headed for next year. Not only that, but the firming and the schedules that we now see relative to what we think we can go do for next year is very encouraging. We'll be talking today about what some scenarios can look like for next year. Think of it as a floor, Harlan, and a base case. We're still, just had an earnings call, right? We just printed our Q2.
We got two more quarters to go this year, and then we're looking out into next year. Given the feedback I've gotten and also the information we now have, I think it's a good opportunity today to share how we're thinking about the business next year and then also how that goes forward. That sound like a good plan?
No, that's perfect. That's exactly what we're looking for, Matt.
Ready to go, Harlan?
I'm ready to go.
OK.
Ready to go.
Let's start with the first question. For some time, and certainly since the earnings call, we've gotten questions about our engagement and our relationship and our partnership with AWS. In December of last year, we announced a five-year agreement with them, which covered a variety of product categories, actually. A whole bunch of things in networking that we could go off and do together, which was a portion of it. Another portion of that was in custom AI silicon. Also, as part of this arrangement, we were leaning in together on the EDA side, and that's gone really well. There's a whole bunch of activity over there. The partnership is going extremely well. We're really happy to see the progress of our customer in the marketplace. We ramped numerous programs together successfully and into production.
We are collaborating closely with them across the board, including the custom AI silicon roadmap. That's all intact. That's going well. Based on the plans that we see today and our outlook for next year, to answer your question from the very beginning, just to tackle it head-on, we do not see a revenue hole next year from custom AI silicon from this customer. On the contrary, and we're going to get into it as we talk about the Marvell opportunity on the custom business overall, when we look through next year and actually into 2027 and 2028, where you have even some new programs kicking in, the short term, medium term, and long term also look very encouraging for our custom silicon business, which, by the way, is still in its early innings.
We're going to talk about that later because I do want to provide some context on where we were and where we're going. Relative to what people care about right now, which is where we're going, next year, like I said, we expect growth. We don't expect a hole. I think the setup is great. I hope that helps address some concerns. Obviously, we have customer confidentiality to think about. The level of detail, as I've said a number of times, we can go into is somewhat limited. I think given the dialogue we're having and where things are looking, this is where we stand today. Now, I want to go through the kind of overall view on data center for a moment, and then we can circle back on a few questions. The first is very encouraged by the demand signals we're seeing.
You can see this reflected in the overall market with big kind of episodic announcements and all kinds of investments, programs, et cetera. Of course, as a result, the expectation for growth again next year in terms of CapEx looks very solid. Now, we don't know exactly where that's going to land. Right now, and I'm going to use this today, Harlan, just as a baseline concept. Basically, CapEx has grown a lot this year. All the projections we're looking at right now have it pegged at about 18% for next year. I think there's probably upward bias there. For the purposes of this discussion today, when we look at the overall Marvell opportunity set, why don't we just go ahead and index it to 18%? If it does better, great. That's a way to help contextualize and think about our business. OK.
Again, given what we see, I want to just remind everybody here, what we're talking about today is what we really see as a floor and kind of a baseline for growth. I think we have opportunities to overachieve, and we'll talk about each of those. For right now, I think let's just use that as a base assumption, and then we'll update as we go along.
OK. That's good.
Yeah, perfect. Let's talk about data center. This business overall, we've given some ratios in the past, and they're still largely consistent, which is, if you bucket it, half the business this year is in our optics franchise, which actually has a number of subcategories that we're going to talk about today with different growth drivers and opportunities. I would just say for a moment, this has been completely ignored by investors, quite frankly. The overwhelming discussion points and all the oxygen has been out of the room talking about really one socket on one custom piece of business. That's why I think it was good to hit that one up front. We can circle back if you have a follow-up. Basically, I want to have the real conversation today, Harlan, about our business.
Half the business is in optics, 25% is in custom, which has come up a lot as we've ramped these programs, and then the other 25% is actually, I mean, it's got its own set of growth opportunities, by the way. That includes our storage franchise, our emerging cloud switching product line, and also our security business, and then just a variety of processors, management switches, things like that that are just general purpose used in data center. Those are three buckets: 50% optics, 25% custom, and then 25% in this emerging category. Let's talk about custom first. 2026 has been a strong year. If you take the 25%, you apply it to what Street thinks we're going to do this year, you just get big round numbers. You get about $1.5 billion, and that's effectively doubled from a year ago.
In one year, we basically have doubled our custom business. When we look into next year, and again, this is for the purposes of just setting a baseline and indexing, we see the custom business growing in line with CapEx as just a base case scenario for next year.
Yes.
Due to the nature of this business, which is today concentrated with a few sockets, more are coming. We're going to talk about that. That's probably the best bet we can use, obviously, as we get closer. If things are biasing up, we can go adjust that. That's a safe assumption. Within our growth for next year, we do have XPU attached kicking in. That's probably some of these new sockets are later in the year. That part's actually growing quite well, but it's smaller as a % of the total. It'll help on the growth. The assumptions we're using right now and the model I'm giving you assumes the current projects that are running continue to the extent there's any generational changes on those products from one generation to another. That's comprehended as well, any product transitions.
Any new major programs on the XPU side may have some small contribution, but you should think of those, as we said at the AI Day, Harlan, as a 2027, 2028 type of inflection. OK, that's the custom. I'm just going to talk about XPU attached for a moment. I would say on my investor meetings, once we got through kind of the big story, there's a lot of interest in this and unpacking XPU attached in more detail. Let me give you some thoughts on it. The first is, in a way, I would bucket that one as today, there's really kind of three major categories we're looking at. One is customized NICs or smart NICs. That could be foundational, or that could actually be with a lot of CPU cores and extra offload special capability. Memory expansion is another one for disaggregated memory.
This was kind of on the basis of a lot of our early CXL investments, which have now created kind of a platform for memory expansion that we can use in our custom platform. Then accelerators and security co-processors, where you want to basically move some of the processing capability that would be inside an XPU, save that valuable real estate for GPU cycles, and move those functions on an offload type of chip. Think of those as kind of the three big buckets.
I would say even since June, when we outlined what we thought that business could do, which was about a $15 billion TAM with a huge quantity of opportunities, which ranged in the kind of couple hundred million dollar lifetime revenue range, even since that investor day, when we look at the business we're closing or actually the products in development as we look to the long-term forecast, the lifetime revenue numbers we gave were probably low. They're definitely creeping up to where we said in the couple hundred million range. Some of these probably are a billion lifetime, Harlan. The average has probably come up. Some of these can end up being quite a bit larger.
The reason that this is happening is because as the XPUs are now going into production and the AI spend is getting so great, there's just a greater need in the economic support doing more and more customization. After 2021, we talked about this, Harlan, called cloud optimized silicon. Basically, the idea that every cloud is unique, everybody's going to want their own optimized TCO network and optimized TCO for compute. That's really what this provides. This business is attractive to us because it leverages a lot of the Marvell IP we already have. We can do a lot of the design work actually for the customer. That makes it asset light on their side. They can get what they want. We tend to get paid a little bit better margin on these because they're not as big as an XPU, as an example in lifetime revenues.
They contain more Marvell IP. They also tend to, they're not tied to the XPU platform. We have programs right now with design wins where it's somebody else's XPU. We're not the provider of that. Somebody else is doing that.
Yes.
Or it's a merchant platform. We can attach to those too. That actually, I think, over time, I'm not calling the year, but I think if you look at it, that 20% target we set as a long-term target for custom market share, I think the XPU portion over time could probably be better than that, just given the traction we're seeing. Let me move on to the optics business. Let me just walk you through data center first, and then we'll take a pause. OK, on optics, this business has done phenomenal. We have blown past any kind of CapEx growth rates for the last four or five years in this business, and I don't see this stopping anytime soon.
If you look at next year and you look at the kind of 18% kind of baseline number, optics is clearly going to do better than that, clearly going to do better than that. 800G is very, very strong for next year. We were early, and we were in a lead position there. 1.6T is now ramping. We're shipping it now. That's going to also layer in next year, but not at the expense of 800G. On top of that, within our optics, which we haven't talked about as much, the traditional optics we have is really for scale out, Harlan. Scale up is something we haven't really talked about, but I'm going to cover it a little bit in this call because in scale up, actually, we have retimers today, Ethernet retimers. We have AECs that are ramping. We have PCIe products that are coming, that are sampling.
That's actually a subproduct category that I'm going to talk about a little bit today. That business is now getting to be important, and it's going to actually be significant revenue growth for us next year, the scale up portion. This doesn't include any switching at this point. This is just retime products and AECs. We'll dive into that a little more later. I'm going to finish this out. That's three quarters of it, right? You got custom, you got optics, and then the remaining business in data center is in the 25% left. Switching is really where the action is, and we'll go over that later. We acquired a company called Innovium back in 2021 to get us into this business. At that time, it had very de minimis revenue.
It was doing like $5 million, $10 million a quarter, but it was going to do $150 million, and that's kind of what the deal model was based on. We already hit that. We actually achieved that very quickly. I mean, we've actually, I was looking back. It feels like forever ago, but really, we had basically, you know, just a few years, right, is really how long we've had this business in terms of when it's actually ramped and going. This year, you know, it's already double, even over double where it was when we were on that baseline $150 million. It's already grown a bunch. It's going to grow again next year as we continue to ship 12.8T, but then 51.2T goes into production.
I'm not willing to call it just yet, but we see very strong growth forecasts for our switching business next year, well above CapEx, obviously. You can just imagine the growth rate we're talking about here. Maybe this thing could be triple at some point where it was on that baseline assumption as we head forward. Within that, you still got storage recovering, which is great. By the way, that was a wall of worry a few years ago. That picked back up. They did that $200 million a quarter. It's come back and probably, you know, goes from there. Then you've got the other products in there, like merchant processors and security stuff. Just to be super conservative on that one, you got the switch growing, and then the other stuff may be a little slower growth.
Just assume that that one goes double digits, right, when you walk through buckets. You got first one at basically baseline at CapEx. Optics, you know, above. This one, put it at double digits. Again, just as a floor, just as a model to work with, you get very healthy growth if you do this. You end up above CapEx relative to where things are at the moment with really, I think, a lot of upside potential. I wouldn't update the model just yet, Harlan, on that. Let's go get some time in front of us. I'm not saying to update the model because we don't think we can do it. I'm saying, you know, wait till we actually can start really getting closer and we can see the opportunity in front of us. That's on the data center.
Let me just finish on comms real quick and enterprise because that just finishes the whole picture of the year, and then we can dive in. On comms and enterprise, or what we're calling communications and other now, we've bucketed, you know, consumer in there, industrial, enterprise, and communications. That whole business, like comms and enterprise, we had guided up like 30% sequentially. That was a question I got from investors. Is that a one-time thing? Is it going to go down after that? Did you guys just kind of overship? Or is there something weird going on? No, no, sure. It's recovered, and it's inflected, which is great. That's on the back of new products actually ramping, plus the inventory recovery.
That business will continue to grow, and I think it's a safe number to pencil in for the whole thing, comms and other, with just assume, you know, consumer stays at $300 million a year. Assume industrial stays at $100 million within there. Just kind of keep those flat. The overall should baseline grow like double digits next year. Everything's growing next year: custom, optics, storage, switching, other comms, enterprise, the whole thing. That's as a floor. That's as a baseline. All right, take a pause for a second. You can fire off another question. Thanks, everybody, for listening for the long opening. I think this was an important way for me to let investors know what was in my head and how we're thinking about the business.
No, I think that was a great overview, very articulate. As you know, that's been one of the concerns by the market: how do we think about the shape of Marvell 's growth profile for next year. I think that was hugely insightful. Like you said, I think part of the reason for you being here today is maybe some of the incremental confidence and visibility on when a lot of these programs are going to fire. I'm just going to kick it off with a number of questions, and we'll get into more details on a lot of the segments that you talked about. Let's just go back to the initial controversy and misconceptions around the business.
Based on your comments about not expecting any hole in revenue from your lead XPU program next year, strong confidence in growing custom revenues in the 18% high teens range as a floor next year, also most of that coming from your existing XPU socket wins, I think that the only reasonable interpretation conclusion is that you have to be participating in your lead customer's next generation program, which has always been my assumption and a topic that we've written on extensively. Understand that you can't comment specifically, but I think you've kind of laid out the breadcrumbs very clearly, which, you know, investors and I should appreciate. Is that fair?
Harlan, you're a smart analyst. I think the way to think about it is, like I said, we have a very good relationship with our lead customer. I'm really pleased on the outlook that we see for next year, you know, overall data center and then within custom, as I mentioned. I think that's a very safe assumption to see that strong growth continue from this year to next year. Like I said, I think short term, medium term, long term, our custom business is in good shape.
That's great. At the June custom AI event, the team talked about this notion of concurrent design programs, right? In other words, at the same time that the team is at the tail end of your customers' 3 nm design, you're already working with your customers on their next generation 2 nm designs. I specifically asked Will Chu, he's the head of your custom cloud programs, right? Is the Marvell team already working on customers' next generation 2 nm designs? He said, quote, "absolutely right." My question to you is, has anything changed from the June event as it relates to 2 nm engagements? Or is the Marvell team still very much engaged on follow-on 2 nm programs with all of your major customers?
Yeah, thanks. I think Will said it right when he said absolutely. I would put an exclamation point on that. Things have only heated up, quite frankly, since we had our June event. We are heads down on multiple programs in terms of driving execution and tapeouts into next year. At some point, it's not even going to be a 2 nm discussion, honestly, Harlan. We're already moving on to the next one. OK? We're going to see multiple products across 2 nm, across the various franchises, absolutely heads down. The concept of multigenerational, having visibility to the roadmap, figuring out where we can intersect, where we can add value, how the customers are thinking about their roadmap, which is, I've said this a few times, I think there's going to be lots of different opportunities. You've got XPU. You've got XPU attached.
Even within XPU, I think you're going to see multiple opportunities and some bifurcation occur. The design activity right now is off the charts. I don't think it's even a 2 nm discussion anymore. At some point next year, I think the discussion is going to be around A14 and A16. How do you think about that? How does the technology evolve? We're still early there. I think we'll have some exciting updates next year around where we see the technology going. It's kind of a follow-on to what we did at the June event. We just announced last month, for example, we did a press release on our 2 nm 64 Gb die-to-die IP, which is being very well received for these different XPU architectures. You'll see it in the press. Behind the scenes, the team is driving strong execution in this area.
Oh, great. Let's shift from the sort of focus on customers and near-term programs. Let's just shift, and you brought this up in your commentary, parts of this. Let's just shift to the overall pipeline, the custom XPU attached pipeline, right? As you rightly pointed out at the June AI Investor Event, the team outlined 18 multigenerational custom XPU and custom XPU attached wins. You mentioned on the recent earnings call additional design wins, the same thing that you mentioned today for custom, taking your sockets to something greater than 18. Can you give any more color in terms of incremental revenue that these design wins are expected to drive? More importantly, the time frame in which these 18 programs will start to contribute more incrementally, more significantly to your profile of your AI business as we move forward.
Yeah, yeah. We've been on fire since the June event. I did a review last week. We had a board meeting, and our sales leader was presenting the whole team's kind of outlook for the year. We're blowing past some of our targets for the whole year right now on some of these different product opportunities, OK? The number is not 18 anymore. It's 20+ that we've now closed, locked, SOW'ed, staffing, et cetera. That's since June. Just to contextualize it a little bit, obviously, we're early here, but I'll give you a framework. This is multiple wins, right? Obviously, to go from 18 to 20+ . It's one incremental XPU opportunity and an emerging hyperscaler. It's multiple XPU attached sockets that we were chasing and working on, have been in the pipeline. Those are now closed.
The way to think about it is, which I'm really encouraged by, is we put out a $75 billion funnel at the AI Day that we were tracking in terms of opportunities, which looked just enormous. It was almost hard to even put the number on the screen because that's like real stuff in our Salesforce system and database. Those are like real sockets we're tracking, like 50 of them. Just to give you a sense, we've now knocked off like 10% of that in basically two, three months. Now we're going to refill it because I think we're already finding new opportunities. Take 75x 10%. That's the lifetime value baseline estimate we have for those wins. That's really encouraging. Some of those will probably hit, we could call it 2028. I think let's just think of this as 2028 and beyond.
It would be not to raise our 2028 kind of goal, but maybe to give incremental confidence that we can get there. These programs, you have a baseline, and some are going to be higher, some are going to be lower. I think the worse the better, OK? These are very solid programs because most of them are follow-ons to things that were already being done, like in a merchant fashion, as an example. These are all very high-quality wins that will contribute in 2028 and beyond. Obviously, if we can go faster, then these would contribute sooner. I think one of the challenges in this market is that once you win something, then it's all hands on deck. Can we have it yesterday? Just for our planning purposes, assume these new wins are just adding into the 2028 and beyond time frame.
Yeah, and Harlan, in terms of how some investors may want to think about how to put that in kind of an annual kind of bucket, right? Think about that, you know, 10% of $75 billion. On average, like we said, these XPU sockets tend to be, you know, only a few years versus the XPU attached is, on average, let's call it four years, right? If you just want to use roughly four years and just take that number divided, that's kind of the incremental revenue on an annualized basis, which is obviously very, very meaningful for us. That's kind of the other thing I wanted to point out.
No, that's great. I've gotten a couple of questions from investors here. I think you did a great job of outlining, you know, a baseline sort of floor/baseline view, the data center business in calendar 2026, right?
I interpret that as somewhere, you know, at the baseline floor in sort of that high teens, the + 20% growth in the data center business, looking into calendar 2026 kind of rough numbers, right? We all know that you have a goal of 20% share of the total data center market by calendar 2028, which would imply, off of the 2026 baseline that you gave us, that Marvell team should see acceleration in their data center business in calendar 2027 and calendar 2028. With the pipeline that you see today and the update that you gave us today, your confidence level on acceleration of data center in calendar 2027 and calendar 2028?
Yeah, it's a great question from probably a great investor because you guys just stole my punch line at the end. Basically, the way to think about it is we've got this outlook for 2026, but it only accelerates, Harlan, in 2027 and 2028. We even said this at the June AI Day. I feel even more incrementally confident in that. We have additional custom programs, new ones kicking in in that time frame on XPU. We have a number of the XPU attached that's starting to layer in. We start to get a more meaningful contribution from 1.6T optics. We start to see 800G ZR taking off. I can go through—the switching thing keeps going. The scale up keeps going. We're going to actually talk about this, I think. I think we should spend some time on it.
The bottom line answer is yes, the growth, our view right now will accelerate in 2027 and 2028 above what we're looking at for next year. This year, think about it. We did basically, based on Street, we'll do about 40%, right?
Yeah, right.
Actually, a little bit more, right, Ashish?
Yeah, 40% would be a good number.
Yeah.
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah, yeah.
So.
Yeah, you look at the TAM and the opportunity set. That's the current thinking.
OK, perfect. Let's move over to the electrical optics business, right? You talked about it at the beginning of our conversation. You've said it over the past number of earnings seasons. To your point, I'm not sure that the market truly understands the growth in the scale of your optics business, right? We used to cover Inphi. When you guys acquired Inphi, I think they were driving $800 million a year in electrical optics. This year, 50% of your data center business, that's a $3 billion optical franchise. Just huge growth in your optical business. Obviously, the Marvell team continues to remain the leader in that space, right? With that in mind, the team kind of near term, you guided your optical business to grow double digits sequentially here in fiscal Q3. It seems like the market isn't, like I said, valuing this business appropriately.
You see this continuing to grow for Marvell in the long term. I know you gave us your view on optical for next year. How do you think about the growth in optical more longer term? What are you seeing on the competitive side as investors are concerned about potential share loss on your core DSP business, right? To put things into context, it feels like from 200 Gb to 400 Gb to 800 Gb to 1.6T, every transition, there always seems to be a lot of noise on the competition. From my perspective, Marvell always ends up coming out the predominant share leader in this space. What are you also seeing on the competitive side as we move to the 1.6T generation?
Yeah, that's great. I'm actually glad I have the floor here to talk about this. I'm going to get a little fired up here, Harlan, OK? We acquired Inphi. We announced it in 2020. We closed it in 2021. We closed it very quickly, executed really well on the transaction. The whole company had done like $680 million the 2020 year. Street had them at like $820 million or something, $830 million for that, which was the whole company, which included some other things. By the way, that was a very high multiple we paid back then. It was unclear, I mean, investors were concerned, what's the accretion going to be on this? It was certainly thin at the headline value. We saw the strategic value. I think the market recognized that pretty quickly. This business has absolutely ripped since we bought it, OK?
The DSP franchise alone has basically 5x'd since that time frame. It was actually about $600 million, just to give you the number that was in that DSP area. That's 5x. That's been growing at 50% CAGR per year since we bought it. It was already at a decent size, by the way. This wasn't going from $50 million a year to $50 million or $100 million a year. It had already ramped. It had more legs in front of it. Absolutely, our team has kicked ass in this area, OK? When we're putting up record numbers, like right now, I would say that, and we can talk about it later, it's not really worth rehashing the past. I appreciate the measured tone you and the JPM team have taken because, and we'll talk about competition after I give you a couple of thoughts first.
I don't know how many times there's been a scare. There's been a concern. There's been a market rumor or something that's gone on. It looks like the world's coming to an end for us. Not the case, not the case. On the transitions, like you said, we absolutely crushed it on the 100 Gb per lane, 200 Gb per lane transition, enabling 1.6T. We're out in the lead on 400 Gb. I'm very, very proud of this team, OK, and what they've been able to accomplish. Now we've gotten this thing, as you mentioned, to like a $3 billion franchise. If you think that, if anybody thinks that all of a sudden, I know that was great, but now it's just going to all go to hell. Not true.
Even if you look at the TAM growth we outlined, right, just the TAM alone at the AI Day was like 25%- 35%. That's just about 30%, right? If you just take the growth and you just assume it can grow with the market, I would put this business up against any other benchmark out there in terms of interconnect franchises. It's healthy from a margin standpoint, very healthy. In fact, we have capacity to continue to invest here aggressively because of the scale. We're doing that. We are staffing new programs. We are staffing new opportunities. We've got an absolutely, I think, best-in-class roadmap. This business has done absolutely phenomenal. Within that as well, you've got the DSP franchise. You also have DCI, right? DCI was always at Inphi about a $100 million business. That's how people thought about it. They invented the category.
They fundamentally brought to market the first pluggable long-haul optics with 100 Gb ZR, led the transition to 400 Gb. We were first to market announcing 800 Gb. By the way, that's still all in front of us. That business has grown at the same rate, by the way. That thing's also like 5x'd, right, and going to keep going, by the way. That's also been a real shining star for us. What drives this business ultimately, you can't sit around. You have to be in the lead. It's not just nanometers. It's architecture. It's the BBA circuits around it. It's the module partnerships. It's the robust supply chain. It's the flexibility. It's the unique feature sets that we're able to incorporate into the chips that no one else knows about because we're first. When people come to follow, sometimes they don't even know what they don't know.
We're just focused in this team, head down, execute, be the big winner. As I look at beyond 1.6T, we're going to 3.2T at some point. PAM still has legs. We've demonstrated the technology. We're deep in development there. The other thing that we pioneered was this concept of coherent light, which DCI uses coherent, inside data center uses PAM. Coherent light was a solution to do like 20-kilometer kind of ranges, like for campus environments. We pioneered that standard and that product line. That is ramping into production. That's going to be a whole market segment for us. That coherent light investment will also benefit us back long term. At some point, when PAM does run out of legs, we have a great solution there in terms of the capability we have. Honestly, I'll just give you the punch line.
This business should be worth more than all of Marvell right now. If you just take like a SOX multiple on this thing, don't even put the sky-high multiples on this. Just put a premium multiple, SOX plus. It's an incredibly valuable asset. We're going to drive value, OK, in this company with all the tools we have. Do not count out this optics business, and do not undervalue it. I just want to give a major shout out to the team that's been involved in driving this incredible performance, the Inphi folks, the Marvell folks, everybody involved. It's really been a stunning performance. Great job, and you know, the future is bright.
Yeah, I'll take that.
Just to remind everybody, just to be clear, this is really still the PAM business, which he talked about, is essentially all scale out. Our revenue today really is vast majority scale out and DCI, right? There's a tiny bit of scale up, which we'll get to next. Just to say that the scale up thing is entirely in front of us. As you know, most of that's on copper on the interconnect side. That's a big opportunity and also on the switching side. I know you're going to get to that. I want to make sure people understand the context that, you know, this core business on its own is going to keep growing to the rates which Matt talked about. There's an entirely new growth paradigm, which is going to come from scale up.
I'm sure we can get to that in a few minutes.
Yeah, exactly. Let's pivot.
I want to get to scale up next because that's going to layer into the growth story.
Yeah, exactly. Let's pivot over to that because I do think that the Marvell core Marvell teams, historical leadership in networking, and then you overlay that with the optical capabilities that the Inphi team brought to the Marvell team, I think it sets you really, really well for this incremental opportunity that the market is starting to figure out, which is this scale up networking connectivity architecture, right? Scale up or what we call within rack connectivity, this opportunity driven by the continued deployment or expansion of deployment of rack scale-based AI systems, right? The Marvell team offers a wide range of solutions here: your switching architecture, AOCs, AECs, retimers, and more. Maybe, Matt, walk us through the opportunity for Marvell. Highlight some of the new products you're developing to capture this growth.
Additionally, how does the opportunity evolve across the different technology protocols for scale up, such as Ethernet, UA Link, and PCI Express?
Yeah, happy to cover all that. A couple of things. One is the scale up thing is totally in front of us. We have participated so far, not at the scale we're going to, OK? One of the reasons for that is that the current generation, both on, and I'll just give two examples, PCIe in terms of retiming and then on the AEC side, both of those first sort of generation products that are now being deployed, they were based on an NRZ modulation, OK? These have not yet made the transition to PAM, right? Our strategy has always been, when that transition happens across the board—retiming, AECs, all these different product categories you mentioned—that would be where Marvell could really, I think, add value. Now, we built a business already. When we acquired Inphi, Marvell had some retimer products for Ethernet.
They had some small business, you know, $30 million a year or something. We've got AECs ramping now this year even. Revenues are going to be approaching $100 million this year. Maybe we don't know. We can see where Q4 lands. We're growing into it, and probably that easily doubles in the near term. Over time, this is going to be off to the races, OK, from an AEC perspective, retimer perspective. It's perfect because we are announcing multiple different products based on our PAM technology, leveraging our latest. We've gone from optical to electrical here. We have excellent SerDes, OK, excellent SerDes in both of these and leadership position here. That's one bucket, right? It's just scale up. We're going to compete. We've got revenue. We've got a bunch of opportunities and design wins. We're engaged across the board.
I think that's going to be a broad-based business where we can compete in that area. Scale up switch is, I think, I don't even know how to size the TAM yet, quite frankly. We have to see how everything plays out. Scale up switch, I just want to be very, very clear on this call. We are absolutely investing here. We are engaged with multiple customers and multiple different platforms at the moment. Some of these will include opportunities we also have with XPUs, but some of these will be independent of that. The reason that this is, I think, a perfect sweet spot for Marvell is you actually have to have switching IP. That is going to be one of the key differentiating things.
We're finding from an ecosystem perspective, whether it's people that, let's just pick people in the photonics world, that are saying, hey, we're going to drive our own CPO roadmap. We need a switch partner. That's one aspect. The other is the hyperscalers themselves, trying to decide on our architecture. It might be UAL. We're investing there. We're involved in that standards body. It could be Ethernet as well. It could be some combination. There is a lot in flux here, Harlan. The first point is you have to actually know how to design a switch. The Innovium IP, which is best in class in terms of low latency, low power, and we can scale that to a very effective scale up switch. We obviously have the connectivity that sits around it.
The key on the connectivity is you have to have the SerDes as well, homegrown SerDes, not third party, not third party IP for switching, not third party IP. We think controlling the whole stack is really, really important. Obviously, having kind of that broad engagement now with 20+ , you know, XPU and XPU attached sockets, all the connectivity we're doing, we are very much in the mix on, and these are not small products. These are large, high ASP, high complexity chips. You have to be also on the leading process node to do these. It's not for the faint of heart kind of derivative product that I'm just going to slap a team together, go make this happen. This is going to be fundamental to how rack scale architecture ultimately is defined. We can have shots on goal, like I said, that connect our connectivity around it.
We have our own photonics effort. We can actually work with partners too. I mean, we're very flexible in how we approach this whole ecosystem. We're trying to enable our customers to have a lot of choice in this area. We're going to be pretty flexible and nimble on how we go to market. There is more to come on this one, Harlan. There have been some questions, are you guys even going to be in this business? Or what are you guys doing? We are heads down in opportunities right now.
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. That's a good segue into maybe diving a little bit deeper into your switching franchise, right? Because, as you mentioned, you bought Innovium, quite a bit of success with the first generation 12.8T switching platform. You're now ramping your 51.2T, what they call Teralynx 10 switching platform, which is comparable to Broadcom's Tomahawk 5 switching chip. Maybe just give us an update on current revenue levels. I think you did throw out some revenue levels. If you could just reiterate that. Customer design wins. We know that you do have a primary customer. Customer design wins beyond the primary customer. Maybe share any insights on the team's product cadence and roadmap over the next few years.
Yeah, yeah, no, we successfully integrated Innovium. The product that we inherited, if you will, or that they had designed was at 12.8T. That was Teralynx 7. We were able to get that into high volume manufacturing and production. It was really a joint effort with the Marvell team and Innovium team. I think that was a combo to actually get it to where we could meet the thermal requirements, the power requirements, manufacturability scale, got that done, executed 51.2T, first pass success. SerDes performance is excellent. We're now working on our 100 Tb product. There's actually an interesting roadmap beyond that, which we have not announced. We are definitely following the roadmap and the cadence of the industry. We're following our customer lead here. Nothing yet to announce. I would just say that, broadly speaking, there's just tremendous interest now that we've proven ourselves with our own product in 51.2T.
Just given the sheer market size and kind of how some of these different opportunities are now bifurcating, I think there's going to be a lot of opportunities for Marvell here in the switching area. I said it earlier, I've given a lot of information. I'm just trying to give some more context for people to understand how much progress we've made. When we bought it, the deal model said $150 million, you know, was kind of the revenue level we would get to, you know, once we sort of got the first products into production. We're running at twice that now. Like I said, in the next, you know, as 51.2T ramps, you could sort of think about it being a 3x on that plus. Start to think about a business that gets to like half a billion dollars, you know, sometime in the next year plus.
Maybe, you know, you don't know where it goes from there, right? Depends on the traction with existing and future customers and then also how the 100 Tb layers in eventually. Very excited on how that's done. I mean, it's only been a couple of years. I think this is one where we just need to be patient. It's great to see the results so far.
No, I agree with you. I think, as you rightly pointed out, this is a strong differentiation and springboard at which to then enter the scale up segment of the market, which is now just emerging. Let's pivot over to because you actually just mentioned that.
Everyone knows our technology on scale up, scale out, on switching. Every single customer, they know they are our customer, they know our people. It's a logical extension on something that's newer where we're not, there's not as, outside the one big merchant guy, there's not a strong incumbent yet. The standards are being developed. It's actually a really good sweet spot for us to enter scale up.
You brought up, as you were talking about how you think about growth in your data center business next year, did break out the other part of the data center business, which included switching. It included storage. I feel like a lot of times, the market sort of misses the fact that Marvell for a long period of time has been a powerhouse in storage controller hooking capabilities, right? The good news about storage and storage controllers is that we are seeing a lot of strong demand pull for high-capacity HDD. We're seeing the strong demand pull for enterprise SSD, right? The market's been looking for what is that correlation between AI demand and workloads and the impact that it has on the high-capacity HDD and enterprise SSD segments of market. That's now finally starting to emerge, right?
The good news is Marvell team, as most of us that have followed Marvell for a long time, knows that you have a very strong position in both near-line HDD controllers and enterprise SSDs, right? Seagate, Micron, Kyocera, right? All customers with a strong demand pull, like I said, these solutions for AI now. Storage was at $1.8 billion per year business for Marvell, as you pointed out. What's the revenue run rate today? I think you said we're getting pretty close there. Can you discuss your design win pipeline? Is there more growth beyond this $800 million floor as you move forward in town?
Yeah, great question. I'm having a back to the future moment here. I feel like I'm back in 2016 when I became CEO of this. Marvell was only a storage company. You know, our goal was actually to diversify away from that. We never said it was a bad business. We just said it was really kind of oversized in terms of our scale. We still are very active in this area. The business has recovered. It was at about a $200 million a quarter run rate kind of as a baseline a few years back in data center, overshot like crazy during the pandemic. I mean, we had some kind of bonkers quarters in there. It really inflected hard down. Everyone's, oh my god, is this ever going to come back? It's basically there now. I can't remember if she's now Q2 or Q3.
It's about there. It's about there.
We're back. I think I agree with your assessment that there absolutely are these growth pockets now that we're going to see into 2026 coming from AI. I would just say that in our business, our storage, you know, not a small portion is actually in fiber channel. That's enterprise on-prem. We've kind of told investors, even going back to last year, just kind of keep that guy flat, or maybe it's down a little. It's not a grower, OK? Even if we see a little of these green shoots within storage, Harlan, that's why the growth rate of that probably is not going to be as strong as you would just sort of mentally model because you've got a fiber channel piece. We see what you're saying for sure. We're seeing upsides on certain parts of our storage business.
That will grow a little bit next year. The real driver of that sort of third category of data center is really the growth in the switching area.
Yeah, I think, Harlan, there is a bit of a call option, I think, on storage from AI. So far, AI hasn't really, you know, because it's been mostly training. I think as you move into inferencing and more complex inferencing, then you start to store training data sets. I think there could certainly be a call option. That's obviously not what we figured into what we talked about. That certainly, I think, is something to be very much aware of. You're starting to hear that. I think that is something we should all keep an eye on. It clearly could be an upside scenario.
As we near the top of the hour, I really appreciate the update from the team here. I have to end it with this, which was it was great to see the billion dollar ASR that you announced earlier today in addition to the $300 million that you've already bought back in this current quarter, right? You also announced the new larger $5 billion stock buyback authorization. You're driving, I don't know, close to like $400 million of free cash flow per quarter. How should we think about, you know, when we think about Marvell, how should we think about the mix between buybacks and M&A going forward?
Yeah, yeah, set aside the ASR for a moment. You're right. I mean, we have been driving very strong free cash flow in this company. We had an investment mode a couple of years back, told everybody we got to go put some capacity stuff in place. We were doing all kinds of expansion. We're reaping the benefits of that now. Like you said, we've already done, you know, $300 million this quarter, right? Now we did the ASR. Look, we got a lot of flexibility, right, when we did the automotive divestiture. Closed it early. Team executed well. Ended up with a lot of cash a lot earlier than we thought. We had a board meeting last week. We discussed it. We looked at kind of where we thought Marvell was. They're very aware. A lot of them have been on the board a long time.
They've seen the journey. Very confident, me, the management team, and the board in the outlook. The $1 billion was really to signify that to investors and also to return capital in a very clear way to investors in the form of the ASR. That was kind of, that was a big, you know, it's like half the proceeds or something. I appreciate everybody letting me invest in that business because nobody wanted me to invest in that business nine years ago. We turned it into a $2.5 billion asset. That's positive. When you look at the $1 billion, you look at the $300 million and kind of what we were going to go do for the next few quarters, we were going to run out on the $3 billion authorization that we had. By the way, we did the $3 billion authorization, Harlan, in March 2024.
We've blown through it, OK? At the time, that was a big number for Marvell , right? We've achieved that very quickly. We discussed it. The board approved, you know, on my recommendation, an increase to $5 billion in terms of the open authorization. That's out there. Even after the ASR, like you kind of referred to it up front on the M&A, I just want to close on this and then give a few closing comments. The first is we still have flexibility, you know, with the cash balance we've got, with the free cash flow that we're going to be generating. We can still, you know, be opportunistic. I've said this when I was on the road with investors. Look, we're at a historic moment.
There may be properties, or there may be teams, or there may be things that we want to go do to really set us up for the next wave of growth. We've been pretty much all organic, Harlan, for like the last four years. We just did it on our own. We invested in ourselves. That's gone great. I want to stay opportunistic. I think as I was preparing for this, I was getting a little fired up. Like, you know, look at this Inphi thing. Yeah, it was doing, it was, you know, it was $600 million to, you know, $3 billion, right? The overall, the overall, you know, so the overall data center has grown. It's on the back of the M&A. Inphi's crushed it. Think about Avera, OK? You just baseline, like what was the data center business in custom back then when we bought it?
It's like $100 million a year. It's 15x, OK? In like four years, 15x. I know everyone's worried about the future and what's going to happen. This is like just ramped. I mean, it doubled year over year. It's going to grow next year. That's really positive. Innovium, I gave you some of those numbers just to contextualize it. When you do the right deal into the right market and you've got a team like Marvell, which is like a great place to work, we know how to integrate. We know how to execute. We know how to bring everybody together in one solution. I think it's powerful. I was reflecting on all this when I was looking at the data and got my own spreadsheet going. This has been an absolute home run. I appreciate investor support over the years to go do that. Look, that's all potential, right?
Right now, we're returning capital to shareholders. We've got a big growth opportunity in front of us. Let me, can I just close now, Harlan? I just got a few more comments.
Absolutely, absolutely, absolutely.
The final thing I would say to everybody, and I told you I was going to be fired up, didn't I, Harlan, at the beginning?
You did, and you are.
I am because, you know, we had a board meeting, as I mentioned, last week. One of the slides I do for the board in my private session is I just show them some pure benchmarking. I calibrate everybody on the big picture. I've had the same set of slides for like eight years. The first slide always shows of the benchmarking, you know, Marvell's performance year over year, you know, so it would be like Q2. We do that vis-a-vis all the large semiconductor companies, just to give the board a landscape. In the last few years, we're kind of moving up. Our growth has been really good. Do you know in Q2, our Q2, on that chart, the fastest growing semiconductor company of large semiconductor companies in terms of percent growth was Marvell. It's the first time it's ever showed up on the chart as the first one.
We're all staring at it like, so is it really the end of the world? I think it's just the beginning. It's not going to all fall apart. All these, all these rumors, all these market noise over the years, I'm talking over the years, right? I'm not picking on anybody in particular. Just stocks up, stocks down. I'm just saying if I just look at the last quarter we printed and how did we do, we're doing pretty well. Like you said at the beginning, we 4x-ed the data center business in four years. We've got a huge market tailwind in front of us in terms of the TAM. We have these product cycles kicking in. We have inflections coming in 2027 and 2028. I think the future is very bright. I don't think, like I said, it's not the end. It's the beginning.
I'm in my 10th year at this company, man. We took 10 years to get here. Now it's time to reap the rewards. My final comment I want to thank, I want to say something. I want to thank my team, all the Marvell people that are listening, or if you're going to read the transcript, I want you to listen to me right now. This is a group that knows how to win. These people are tireless. They're fearless. They've been relentless. We have been the underdog, the scrapper. We're humble. We're hungry, OK? We never take anything for granted. This is a team here that has no excuses. They just get it done. I appreciate everybody's patience in the Marvell employee base for riding the waves and the things that go on that aren't in their control.
Our engineers don't know what's going on and why this stops up one day and why it's down another day. What they should know is you guys continue to deliver the value, and you will be rewarded with the value. I want everybody in this company to be successful, make money, and build your career here. With that, I couldn't be more proud of the team. I appreciate, Harlan, the opportunity to have more of a freeform podcast, you know, let it rip type of a discussion so you guys could all hear the passion I have for this, the confidence I have in the business, and that the future is very bright for Marvell. I appreciate everybody's interest in the company. Thank you.
I appreciate that. I appreciate that, Matt, and Ashish as well. Thank you very much for the great insights today. I think you really did a great job of clearing the air on some of the controversies, misconceptions, but more importantly, laying out the strong f or growth opportunities, right, as you just highlighted. I also want to thank everyone on the call for listening today as well. Hopefully everybody has a great week, and thank you for tuning in.
Thank you, Harlan.
All right, thanks everybody.
Thank you.