Please note this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Mr. Ashish Saran, Senior Vice President of Investor Relations. Thank you. You may begin.
Thank you. Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to Marvell's first fiscal quarter 2027 earnings call. Joining me today are Matt Murphy, Marvell's Chairman and CEO, Willem Meintjes, CFO, Chris Koopmans, President and COO, and Sandeep Bharathi, President, Data Center Group. Let me remind everyone that certain comments made today include forward-looking statements, which are subject to significant risks and uncertainties that could cause our actual results to differ materially from management's current expectations. Please review the cautionary statements and risk factors contained in our earnings press release, which we filed with the SEC today and posted on our website, as well as our most recent 8-K, 10-K, 10-Q, and other documents filed by us from time to time with the SEC. We do not intend to update our forward-looking statements. During our call today, we will refer to certain non-GAAP financial measures.
A reconciliation between our GAAP and non-GAAP financial measures is available in our earnings press release. Let me now turn the call over to Matt for his comments on the quarter. Matt?
Thanks, Ashish, good afternoon, everyone. For the first quarter of fiscal 2027, Marvell delivered record revenue of $2.418 billion, reflecting 9% sequential and 28% year-over-year growth. Revenue exceeded the midpoint of guidance, as a result, non-GAAP earnings per share of $0.80 exceeded the midpoint of guidance by $0.01. We are seeing strong demand and exceptional bookings across our entire data center portfolio. This robust demand is reflected in our guidance for the second quarter of fiscal 2027, where we expect total company revenue to grow 12% sequentially and 35% year-over-year at the midpoint to $2.7 billion. On our earnings call last quarter, we indicated that beginning in Q2, we expected quarterly revenue growth throughout fiscal 2027 to trend in the high single-digit range sequentially on a percentage basis. Q4 revenue exiting the fiscal year at approximately $3 billion.
We are now guiding Q2 revenue to grow double digits sequentially, and we expect Q3 and Q4 revenue to also grow by at least 10% sequentially. As a result, we now expect $3 billion in quarterly revenue in Q3, one full quarter ahead of our prior outlook. We also continue to expect year-over-year revenue growth rate to accelerate each quarter throughout fiscal 2027, reaching approximately 50% by Q4. As a result, we now expect overall Marvell Technology revenue in fiscal 2027 to grow approximately 40% year-over-year to nearly $11.5 billion. The increase in our revenue outlook continues to be driven by our data center business, which we now expect to grow approximately 50% this fiscal year. Notably, we expect our interconnect business to grow more than 70% year-over-year, well above our prior expectation of 50% growth. I will provide additional color on our interconnect business later in today's call.
For our communications and other end market, we continue to expect revenue growth of approximately 10% in fiscal 2027. Looking ahead to fiscal 2028, while we are planning for the rate of cloud CapEx growth to moderate into the 30%+ range, we expect strong data center revenue growth for Marvell to continue. We expect our interconnect business to continue to outpace cloud CapEx growth, reflecting strong 1.6T demand from scale-out networking and more meaningful contributions from scale-up and scale-across networking. We now expect our custom business to more than double year-over-year in fiscal 2028, higher than our prior outlook, and expect our Ethernet switching business to continue ramping. As a result, we expect data center revenue in fiscal 2028 to grow approximately 55% year-over-year, accelerating from fiscal 2027's projected growth rate.
For our communications end market, we continue to expect low single-digit % revenue growth in fiscal 2028, consistent with our prior view. In aggregate, we now expect overall company revenue to grow approximately 45% in fiscal 2028, off a higher fiscal 2027 base. As a result, we now expect Marvell's fiscal 2028 revenue to reach approximately $16.5 billion, roughly $1.5 billion higher than the outlook we provided on our earnings call last quarter. This outlook is supported by demand trends we are seeing today and by programs already in execution. Our investments in securing supply are paying off, enabling us to scale the business every quarter. As we move through the fiscal year, we expect to remain closely aligned with our customers as they continue investing aggressively in AI infrastructure.
Now let me turn to the expanded partnership we announced with NVIDIA, which reflects the growing importance of high-speed connectivity, optical interconnect, and accelerated infrastructure in scaling AI. The collaboration connects Marvell's custom silicon and optical networking capabilities directly into the massive NVIDIA ecosystem to help build scalable, highly efficient AI data centers and telecommunications networks. There are three core pillars of this exciting announcement. First is our optics partnership. Marvell has long been a key supplier of DSPs, TIAs, and drivers, and we are now extending this relationship to collaborate on silicon photonics technology, which is expected to be a key enabler of scale-up networking. Second, NVLink Fusion integration. This allows Marvell to build custom chips and networking semiconductors that can seamlessly interface with NVIDIA infrastructure.
It increases choice for hyperscalers who will now have complete flexibility to mix and match custom and merchant capabilities across their platforms, with Marvell uniquely providing the bridge between these two architectures. We expect this to create new market opportunities for both Marvell and NVIDIA going forward. Third is AI RAN. Marvell will enhance its existing OCTEON base station processors to work directly with NVIDIA GPUs, integrating AI with wireless infrastructure on a single software-defined computing platform. This will enable telecommunications operators to run both 5G and 6G radio workloads and high-performance AI applications concurrently on the same hardware. Since the announcement, both teams are off to the races, and we are working closely together to realize the benefits of this collaboration. We deeply appreciate the partnership and the investment from NVIDIA. Okay, let me provide more color on our current business, beginning with data center.
In our data center end market, we delivered record first quarter revenue of $1.83 billion, representing 11% sequential growth and 27% year-over-year growth. We achieved sequential and year-over-year growth across multiple product lines, including optical interconnect, custom silicon, and switching. Looking ahead to the second quarter, we expect data center revenue growth to accelerate into the mid to high teens sequentially on a percentage basis and into the mid 40% range year-over-year. Our networking products, including interconnect and switching, are driving strong revenue growth as networking becomes increasingly critical with each new generation of AI infrastructure. In the early stages of generative AI, the primary focus was on addressing compute and memory bottlenecks.
As more complex architectures such as reasoning modules and mixture of experts have begun to deploy, the role of networking has become significantly more important and is the key driver of the increased demand we are seeing today for our scale-out networking products. What is completely in front of us is the massive expansion expected in scale-up networks as these domains become significantly larger, requiring high radix, low latency switches, as well as high bandwidth optical interconnects. In addition, these new AI models are also driving innovation in memory architecture, which we expect will benefit our XPU attach business. We expect the emergence of agentic AI to further supercharge demand for our scale-out, scale-up and XPU attach businesses. In agentic AI, a single user request may require agents to query AI models many times rather than just once, as in traditional one-shot inferencing.
These queries may also be routed to different parts of the AI cluster to complete a single task. This substantially increases the volume of data traffic that must be transmitted and switched with very low latency across longer reaches, as well as the amount of memory required. Agentic AI is also expected to drive a significant increase in the number of CPUs deployed in AI infrastructure. More CPUs require more NICs, PCIe switches and retimers, as well as greater bandwidth and CPU-centric front-end networks. As a result, we believe agentic AI can provide another significant tailwind for our interconnect switching and XPU attach franchises. It is increasingly clear that optics is the future of data center connectivity, and we continue to invest aggressively in our technology platform to extend our leadership in this rapidly expanding market.
Our latest addition is the acquisition of Polariton, a developer of high-speed, low-power plasmonics-based silicon photonics devices. Plasmonics offer meaningful advantages over traditional silicon photonics by enabling substantially higher modulator bandwidth, which is critical for supporting faster optical transmission speeds. Polariton has already demonstrated plasmonic modulator bandwidth exceeding one terahertz, up to 10 times higher than current silicon photonics and thin-film lithium niobate-based solutions. We are excited to incorporate this breakthrough technology into our DCI and coherent light roadmaps, extending our technology platform to 3.2T and beyond. Let me now pivot back to the near-term and discuss trends we are seeing across both our established data center businesses and our newer growth initiatives. I'll organize the discussion into three categories: interconnect, switching, and custom. I'll start with interconnect, which represents the largest portion of our data center business.
Demand for our interconnect products continues to accelerate, and as a result, we have increased our fiscal 2027 revenue growth expectations for this business to more than 70% year-over-year. Interconnect is also a major driver of the higher fiscal 2028 company revenue outlook we provided today. We are benefiting from our leadership position across the industry's broadest portfolio of high speed connectivity solutions, spanning scale-out, scale-across, and scale-up networking. Within our scale-out PAM franchise, demand continues to strengthen for our 800G products, while our 200G per lane 1.6T solutions are ramping quickly this fiscal year, following their production launch in the second half of fiscal 2026. We expect 1.6T revenue to take another substantial step up in fiscal 2028. We continue to benefit from the first to market cadence we have maintained across successive PAM4 generations.
We also expect to maintain leadership into the next PAM4 generation with 400G per lane technology, which we demonstrated first at the Optical Fiber Conference in April 2025. In addition to our DSP franchise, we have also built a formidable position in broadband, analog, TIAs and drivers. This business is scaling rapidly, and we expect quarterly revenue from TIAs and drivers to exceed a $1 billion annualized run rate in the next few quarters. To support campus-wide data center architectures requiring longer reach than traditional PAM solutions, we were the first to introduce coherent light products to the market. These solutions are optimized for applications spanning two to 20 kilometers within an extremely low power envelope as compared to traditional coherent DSPs. Over time, as speeds continue to rise, we expect coherent light to penetrate deeper inside data centers, complementing PAM-based solutions for shorter reach applications.
We've already begun shipping the first generation of our coherent light 200G per lane 1.6T products. We are now introducing next generation coherent light products featuring integrated MACsec security as well as higher speed capabilities. Turning to DCI, this market is undergoing a major architectural transition driven by the emergence of scale-across networks, which we believe will significantly expand the opportunity for pluggable DCI modules over the next several years. Marvell pioneered the pluggable DCI market, where the original use case was driven by hyperscalers replacing public WAN connections for intersite connectivity using pluggable modules, with traffic between data centers originating primarily from traditional front-end networks. This has become a highly successful business for Marvell, and today we ship DCI solutions to all five major U.S. hyperscalers.
What is now changing is the push to build significantly larger AI clusters, which increasingly must span multiple data centers due to power and space constraints. In these architectures, the back-end AI network must also extend between the data centers, creating the scale-across use case, where massive amounts of data move continuously between SBUs during AI workload processing. Aggregate bandwidth requirements for scale-across networks are projected to be more than 10 times higher than those of current front-end DCI networks. As a result, industry forecasts project the pluggable DCI TAM to grow significantly by rapidly increasing speeds and rising feature complexity, including integrated MACsec security. While traditional DCI networks today primarily deploy 400G solutions and are now transitioning to 800G, scale-across architectures are expected to rapidly adopt 1.6T connectivity.
Marvell is exceptionally well positioned to lead this transition with the industry's first secure 1.6T ZR and ZR+ DCI modules, powered by our new two nanometer coherent DSP announced earlier this year. These modules are expected to begin sampling this year. This positions Marvell to extend our technology leadership into the emerging scale-across market, supported by our proven expertise in high volume manufacturing of these highly specialized and complex modules. Our leadership position here is translating into strong revenue momentum for our DCI module business, giving us line of sight to a $1 billion annualized revenue during fiscal 2028. This would represent approximately double the revenue we achieved in fiscal 2026, when the business generated roughly $500 million in revenue. As scale-across deployments become a larger portion of the market, we expect growth in our DCI business to accelerate further. Let me now transition to scale-up optics.
Scale-up interconnect represents one of the newest and most strategically important opportunities emerging in AI infrastructure. Marvell is uniquely positioned to enable both NPO and CPO implementations with a broad silicon photonics platform spanning all three mainstream modulator technologies, including MZM, EAM, and MRM, fully supported by our market-leading broadband analog TIAs and drivers. We are also investing in emerging approaches such as microLED and microVCSEL-based solutions. Marvell has already shipped more than 1 million DCI modules powered by our silicon photonics over the past decade. Across 4 generations of silicon photonics deployments, we have accumulated more than 15 billion hours of field data with demonstrated world-class reliability. We have leveraged this experience in developing our silicon photonics-based light engines, and we are deeply engaged with multiple tier 1 customers with our third generation 6.4T light engine for NPO and CPO implementations.
Our acquisition of Celestial AI added photonic fabric technology, including EAM modulators and the industry's leading low power analog SerDes. The solution has already been selected by a tier 1 hyperscaler for its next generation of XPU scale-up networks. The full strength of Marvell's engineering and operations organization is focused on bringing Celestial's first generation chiplet into high volume manufacturing. We are also making significant progress with MRM-based scale-up interconnect solutions. We completed our MRM device demonstrations last year and continue to collaborate closely with TSMC on its CoWoS platform. We believe scale-up interconnect represents a massive new TAM that will likely be served by multiple photonic technologies and architectures, and we are investing aggressively to establish leadership across all of them.
We are seeing market adoption accelerate from multiple CPO and NPO engagements, as a result, we expect our scale-up optics business to ramp significantly next fiscal year, with revenue forecasted to more than double our prior outlook of approximately $150 million, which was based at that time solely on Celestial AI. Turning to data center switching, we continue to benefit from sustained demand for our 12.8T and strong ramp of our next generation 51.2T switches for scale-out networking. We are seeing strong engagement for both existing and new customers for our 51.2T platform, as well as our new 100T platform, which we believe delivers industry-leading power efficiency and low latency, attributes that are increasingly critical for AI infrastructure. Our engineering teams are already executing the roadmap towards 200T Ethernet switching and beyond.
Given this momentum, we expect scale-out switch revenue in fiscal 2027 to exceed $600 million, doubling from fiscal 2026, and we currently see the business tracking to more than $1 billion in annualized revenue in fiscal 2028. Scale-up switching is an emerging market where we have significantly increased our investment, both organically and through the acquisition of XConn. We substantially expanded our team and capabilities. While some customers are currently deploying PCIe switches for their current generation of scale-up networking, the radix and bandwidth limitations of PCIe are expected to drive a rapid transition towards purpose-built, large radix, high bandwidth UALink, eSUN, and NVLink solutions. Marvell is uniquely positioned to support all of these scale-up protocols through our internally developed UALink and eSUN switches, as well as our expanded partnership with NVIDIA around NVLink Fusion. We currently have multiple engagements with tier 1 customers for our scale-up switch portfolio.
Given the size of the scale-up TAM, each of these engagements represents a multi-billion dollar lifetime revenue opportunity. We believe we are exceptionally well-positioned in this market, leveraging decades of extensive experience developing large reticle size switch silicon, as well as our in-house best in class high performance SerDes technology. Now let me touch on a few additional growth opportunities in data center. In the AEC market, we are seeing strong interest in our Golden Cable program, and we have already secured design wins with 3 tier 1 U.S. hyperscalers, along with several other customers. We are also seeing strong traction for our retimer products. Both AECs and retimers are now ramping, and we expect combined revenue to more than double year-over-year in fiscal 2027 and continue growing rapidly in fiscal 2028.
The acquisition of XConn also advanced PCIe and CXL switch solutions to our portfolio, and we are seeing strong interest in our PCIe Gen 6 and CXL 3.1 solutions. Marvell is well-positioned in both of these markets to provide customers with complete end-to-end solutions and reference designs consisting of our PCIe switches paired with retimers, as well as our CXL switches paired with our memory expanders. Okay, turning now to our custom business. Custom revenue remains on track to grow more than 20% year-over-year in fiscal 2027, led by our flagship XPU program, which we expect to drive multiple years of growth across multiple generations. Several XPU attach programs are also ramping in fiscal 2027, including our CXL and NIC products. Looking ahead to fiscal 2028, we now expect custom revenue to more than double year-over-year, which is higher than our prior outlook.
The growth is expected to be driven by three primary factors, including, first, continued growth from our existing custom programs, including our flagship XPU. Second, over 10 XPU attach programs reaching higher production volumes, with demand continuing to exceed prior forecasts, particularly in NIC and CXL memory attach use cases, driven by increasing inference KB caching requirements. Third, the ramp of our new tier 1 XPU program into volume production. This program continues to progress very well through development, and we already have firm requirements in place for all of next fiscal year. Since last quarter, we have won several new designs as customers continue to expand their adoption of custom silicon. We expect these new sockets to begin contributing incremental revenue following their typical development cycle of approximately two years.
The level of custom engagement with key customers remains unprecedented, and we continue to be deeply involved in a broad set of significant additional opportunities. We remain confident in achieving our target model for our custom business to deliver on over $10 billion in revenue in fiscal 2029. Turning to our communications and other end market. We delivered first quarter revenue of $585 million, up 3% sequentially and 29% year-over-year. For the second quarter, we expect revenue to decline in the mid-single digit range sequentially on a percentage basis, while growing in the high single digit range year-over-year on a percentage basis. The communications and other end market has now largely recovered from inventory corrections at our customers, and going forward, we expect revenue in this end market to broadly reflect the underlying trends in our enterprise networking carrier and consumer businesses.
In summary, our business continues to accelerate and we have increased our revenue outlook multiple times over the past several quarters. Today, we are again raising our outlook, increasing our fiscal 2027 revenue forecast by more than a half a billion dollars and our fiscal 2028 outlook by approximately $1.5 billion, versus the projections we provided last quarter. Our data center revenue grew 46% year-over-year in fiscal 2026, and we are now projecting growth to accelerate to approximately 50% in fiscal 2027 and accelerate again to 55% in fiscal 2028. Our customers continue to signal robust demand, not only for this year, but for the next several years. Our results and outlook reinforce our confidence that Marvell is in a strong multi-year growth cycle with substantial runway ahead. Today, we sit here in a unique position to simultaneously, one, drive incredibly strong top-line growth.
Two, increase R&D investment strategically in the highest growth AI opportunities while continuing to drive operating leverage. Three, make necessary capacity investments to fuel the next wave of growth. Four, continue strong capital returns to shareholders. The Marvell team is firing on all cylinders with strong momentum expected to continue across the business. We have built a well-diversified company anchored by multiple large existing franchises and complemented by several emerging growth engines. I look forward to updating you on our progress as we continue this exciting journey as a key enabler of next generation AI infrastructure. With that, I'll turn the call over to Willem for more details on our recent results and outlook.
Thank you, Matt, good afternoon, everyone. Let me start with our financial results for the first quarter of fiscal 2027. Revenue was $2.418 billion, growing 28% year-over-year and 9% sequentially. Data Center was our largest end market, contributing 76% of total revenue. GAAP gross margin was 52.1%. Non-GAAP gross margin was 58.9%. Moving on to operating expenses. GAAP operating expenses were $921 million, including stock-based compensation, amortization of acquired intangible assets, restructuring costs, and acquisition-related costs. Non-GAAP operating expenses came in at $577 million. Our GAAP operating margin was 14%, while our non-GAAP operating margin was 35%. For the first quarter, GAAP earnings per diluted share was $0.04, lower than our guidance, reflecting the impact of purchase accounting for the Celestial AI and Xcon acquisitions and the related earn-out obligation.
We expect this to normalize in the second quarter, as reflected in our strong GAAP net income guide. We have now delivered six consecutive quarters of positive GAAP net income and expect to continue to drive strong GAAP profitability going forward. Non-GAAP earnings per diluted share was $0.80, above the midpoint of guidance, reflecting year-over-year growth of 29%. Turning to our cash flow and balance sheet. In the first quarter, cash flow from operations was a record $639 million. Our inventory at the end of the fourth quarter was $1.4 billion, almost flat from the prior quarter. During the quarter, we repurchased $200 million of our stock through our ongoing capital return program and returned $54 million to shareholders through cash dividends in the quarter.
As of the end of the first quarter, our total debt was $4.96 billion, with a growth debt-to-EBITDA ratio of 1.44 times and a net debt-to-EBITDA ratio of 0.32 times. Turning to our guidance for the second quarter of fiscal 2027. We are forecasting revenue to be in the range of $2.7 billion ±5%. We expect our GAAP gross margin to be between 52.1% and 53.1%. We expect our non-GAAP gross margin to be between 58.25% and 59.25%. Looking forward, we anticipate that the overall level of revenue and product mix will remain key determinants of our gross margin in any given quarter. We project our GAAP operating expenses to be approximately $960 million. We anticipate our non-GAAP operating expenses to be approximately $600 million in the second quarter.
We expect our GAAP other income expense, including interest on our debt, to be an expense of approximately $68 million. We expect our non-GAAP other income and expense, including interest on our debt, to be an expense of approximately $35 million. We expect a non-GAAP tax rate of 11%. We expect our basic weighted average shares outstanding to be 899 million and our diluted weighted average shares outstanding to be 915 million. The increase from the prior quarter reflects the full impact of shares issued for the Celestial AI and XConn acquisitions, as well as the shares issued as part of the NVIDIA investment. We anticipate GAAP earnings per diluted share in the range of $0.32-$0.42. We expect non-GAAP earnings per diluted share in the range of $0.88-$0.98.
As we look ahead, we intend to continue to invest in growing our business while driving operating leverage. For fiscal 2027, we expect non-GAAP operating expense of approximately $2.45 billion, which includes the acquisition of Celestial AI and XConn, both of which close in the first quarter of this fiscal year. For fiscal 2028, we expect non-GAAP operating expense to grow year-over-year approximately in the mid to high teens on a percentage basis. This is significantly below the 45% revenue growth outlook Matt Murphy provided in his remarks for that year. As a result, we expect to achieve the upper end of our target operating margin model of 38%-40% as we progress through fiscal 2028. Based on the design wins we have secured and our confidence in sustained customer demand, we are aggressively locking in additional capacity to ensure our growth.
We are following the same successful playbook we established during the last major supply crunch, which includes sharing our long-term demand outlook with key suppliers and making strategic prepayments to ensure capacity. This approach has served us well, enabling Marvell to scale revenue significantly during a period when the broader industry has remained supply constrained. We are forecasting approximately $1 billion in prepayments during this fiscal year, with the first payments beginning in the second quarter. These prepayments will be applied against future material purchases. We expect to fund these prepayments through our strong balance sheet and robust operating cash flow generation. In parallel, we plan to continue to repurchase shares to manage dilution. I am very pleased with our execution, driving strong revenue growth and operating leverage, as well as robust cash flow generation and ongoing stock buybacks.
We are looking forward to continuing to deliver strong earnings growth to our stockholders. With that, we are ready to start our Q&A session. Operator, please open the line and announce Q&A instructions. Thank you.
Thank you. Thank you. Our first question comes from the line of Vivek Arya with Bank of America Securities. Please proceed.
Thank you for taking my question. Matt, towards the end of your presentation, you mentioned something along the lines of your custom XPU is on target to hit $10 billion in fiscal 2029. I just wanted to make sure that we heard that correctly, because that would mean that fiscal 2028, if your XPU is a little over $4 billion and then it gets to $10 billion, that's an increase of at least $5 billion-$6 billion year-over-year in sales. I just wanted to make sure that I heard that. Then, Matt, at what point will you feel more comfortable talking about that large customer and the progress in this new program? Do you expect to be exclusive in this? Because they have a really large CapEx profile.
When do you think investors should start to give Marvell more credit for that new XPU program that should start next year?
Yeah, thanks, Vivek. Yeah, you heard it right. Just for context on the $10 billion-plus for fiscal 2029, the context for that is, back in April 2024, we set long-term targets out through calendar 2028, which would be our fiscal 2029. At that time, we had identified a data center custom overall market, overall custom silicon market, which would generate about $8 billion in revenue for us, was sort of what you if you assume 20% of our market sizing at that time for fiscal 2029. At our custom silicon event last summer in June of 2025, we then said basically the TAM is bigger. The implied, again, if we achieved our share targets in fiscal 2029, would indicate something over $10 billion. It was like a $55 billion TAM. Take 20% on that's $11 billion. Call it in that range.
Yeah, we're still tracking to it. That's a key part of our assumption. Two years ago, it looked like a very steep hill to climb. We're clearly making progress there. Yeah, between our existing programs, our new ramp, and just a plethora of XPU attach programs, all of which have sized up significantly since we won them. We definitely see line of sight to hit those targets. Again, this is just updating investors along the way about how we're progressing. On your second question, program remains on track. I think we're hitting all of our milestones. We see for next year, I think it's stated in my prepared remarks, kind of across the board on all of the custom programs we have, we're seeing indications of greater need for demand. We had judged that one down pretty significantly.
I think as we progress through the year, to answer your questions, I think we'll all gain confidence in the magnitude of that ramp. It's on track, and it's a key part of our plan for next year. It's not the only piece. It's probably still about a third of the total growth we're expecting in our custom business next year. Yeah, it's on a very strong trajectory, Vivek, from fiscal 2027 to 2028 to 2029 and beyond on the custom side overall, which includes XPU and XPU attach. Thanks.
Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Harlan Sur with J.P. Morgan. Please proceed.
Good afternoon. Thanks for taking my question. Matt, with the aggressive evolution of inferencing compute workloads, this has really opened up a lot of opportunity for these XPU offload engines like an LPU processor, an STX processor, right? That's what motivated NVIDIA, for example, to acquire that startup Groq, right? That has this unique SRAM-based memory architecture that's enabled them to design a very efficient sort of low latency inferencing engine called LPU. I seem to recall that the Marvell team actually co-designed the startup's first generation LPU inferencing chip. We all know that Marvell has always focused on memory and in particular SRAM-based IP, like highest density, lowest power. In fact, I think you guys brought the industry's first two nanometer SRAM IP to the market last year. Is the Marvell team leveraging this differentiation?
Are you seeing more interest in SRAM-based XPU offload ASICs, and do you already have XPU attached design wins for SRAM-based offload architectures?
Thanks for the question, Harlan. First, you definitely pay attention. We talked about this actually quite extensively in June of 2025 at our custom silicon event. We had a whole dedicated presentation actually on our best-in-class SRAM design capability and IP. That's, by the way, a legacy and a history investment area that goes all the way back to the Avera acquisition and prior to that, the team being in GlobalFoundries and IBM. There's a long legacy there. That technology has evolved from networking products into AI products, and you can see that trend in the market as inferencing is happening. That continues to be a key part of our IP portfolio for sure as we go win designs, and it's one of the reasons why we are winning our designs in XPU attach.
It's part of the bigger strategy really, which is, I think having the full suite of solutions, right, from advanced packaging, best-in-class high speed IO, and just the ability to really dive in and get to develop these solutions with our customers in very aggressive time to market time frames, leveraging our manufacturing expertise and our capacity, et cetera. It's one piece of the puzzle, but it is an important piece for sure, and we definitely see that as a trend out there, Harlan. We'll keep you updated.
Thanks.
Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Timothy Arcuri with UBS. Please proceed.
Thanks a lot. Matt, I wanted to ask about the breadth of the customer base. I know we've talked about the existing XPU you have. There's this new customer on the XPU, and then you do have some XPU attach with a third customer as well. There's some speculation that you actually might be moving into the compute TAM, and that's by far the biggest custom compute wallet out there. Is that included in the forecast, or would that be incremental to this? I guess I'm just trying to ask about the breadth of the customer base, because I know you mentioned about the engagements broadening. Wondering if you could talk about that. Thanks.
Well, I think a couple of things. The first is, we've said this for some time, we have custom engagements across the board at all the U.S. hyperscalers, and we've had that for some time. Some XPU, some XPU and XPU attach, some just XPU attach. That's part of the AI custom silicon event we did last summer, is indicating that broad pipeline of opportunities and sockets. Everything we've laid out, which is the greater than 20% growth this year, more than doubling next year, then still having line of sight to our long-term targets. That's all based on the designs we've already won and locked and even going back, really, the last summer.
If some of these programs, again, the timing on them, the newer ones we've won since last summer, if you can get them done in a 2-year timeframe, then you might get some contribution from that in fiscal 2029, but that's not needed. Think of that as like an insurance policy. Great, if some of those hit, then if you're worried about some of the existing programs not quite getting there. When we look at the whole picture net-net, we feel very comfortable with the trajectory of our custom business, and it's not requiring anything incremental. I would just say broadly across the board, our technology platform is very competitive, and we're out there competing every day for the most important sockets in the world. Again, those would contribute later.
At our 2 nanometer platform and then beyond, our roadmap is very compelling, and it's only strengthened since our custom silicon event last summer. This business is inflecting, and it's definitely on the right track. Again, I highlighted a number of reasons why that is with Harlan's question, but I'll just tell you that what we've really seen, and it's been pretty pronounced, I would say, in the last six months or so, is that the performance of our high-speed IO, our SerDes performance, our die-to-die, and our ability to integrate that very densely in XPU switching applications, XPU attach applications, is the amount of activity we're seeing on demand for that, I think people realizing that really it's us and just maybe a couple other people that can do this at the level that's needed for this level of performance integration.
It's driving a whole new set of opportunities, quite frankly. Again, design activity is through the roof at Marvell across the board, but including on custom silicon.
Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Aaron Rakers with Wells Fargo. Please proceed.
Hi, guys. This is Michael Svedanov on behalf of Aaron. Thank you for the question. I think you mentioned in your script that you had a few, I think, new XPU or custom, I guess, socket wins. Could you just provide any additional color on, I guess, those XPUs or XPU attach or maybe the type accelerator or just type of chip? That'd be really helpful. Thank you.
Yeah, no additional details at this time. I think it's just another data point we're trying to give people that based on the 50-plus type of opportunities we outlined last June, we continue to close on those. That opportunity pipeline continues to grow in terms of sockets and dollars, by the way. I think every program we looked at a year ago is larger when we look a year later. No additional details at this time. At the right time, we'll do a more comprehensive look back and update you on our progress. Right now, at least from the current business we have, the revenue line is definitely moving in the right direction and strong validation for the capabilities that we have.
Thanks.
Thank you. Our next question comes to the line of Blayne Curtis with Jefferies. Please proceed.
Hey, guys. Thanks for taking my question. Matt, I wanted to ask about specifically the CXL opportunity alongside accelerators. How real is that opportunity? Is there a way to think about the content for accelerator for that?
Well, yeah, it's a very real opportunity. One, is we engaged in this business actually a few years back, and this was when the applications were really driven by traditional server dynamics for x86 compute, and that's obviously vectored over into AI. I think we had a plan in this area, which we've talked about, getting that sort of custom line item of XQ attach alone over $1 billion in revenue in the next couple of years. That continues to expand both because we continue to expand the customer base, which is very compelling. Also, I think the concerns around the memory cycle we're in are driving additional adoption of CXL-based design. It's sort of no secret at this point that I think the memory architectures are endemic and critical on how people think about deploying their next generation infrastructure.
I think us coming in with these very proven solutions now for CXL are really playing in our favor. I think it's just the trend line continues and just it continues to size up both because of the CapEx, higher penetration due to some of the memory issues, and then just more and more of these solutions moving into inferencing. Those are some of the trends that we're seeing, Blayne.
Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Chris Caso with Wolfe Research. Please proceed.
Yes, thank you. Good evening. Question is about some more color on how you're addressing capacity constraints right now. You spoke about some of the prepayments. First part of the question is how you're managing to get that additional capacity. As a follow-on to that, with the increase in guidance, is that a function of you managing to get more capacity out of your supply base, or is it really more of a factor of becoming more comfortable with the forecast your customers already given you and know that you didn't guide us to everything your customers had put in their forecast in the first place?
Yeah, thanks. Hey, I'll hand this one over to Chris, who's been knee-deep in this. Just to give a shout-out to our team, our supply chain operation's been doing an outstanding job, and our suppliers have been doing an outstanding job continuing to react to the changes upward in demand. We've been very pleased with that, we are in great shape overall to deliver on what we just talked about. I'll have Chris give some more color on how we're going about that.
Sure. Thanks, Matt. Yeah, I think as Matt mentioned, I've been dealing with the operations side since 2020, 2021, and I don't think we've been in an unconstrained environment since then. Everything that touches AI has been constrained basically since the beginning of this. Ultimately, the way we've been able to manage this is by building very tight relationships with a small number of key suppliers, giving them a five-year forecast of what we need and hitting what we need each time along the way and doing what we said we were going to do. That goes a long ways towards getting what you need when you take everything that you need as you go along. We work very closely with all of our key customers and with our key suppliers to give them that forecast.
Yeah, there's really only a handful of companies that are driving this AI infrastructure TAM build-out. In order to do that, part of that is the prepayments that Willem mentioned that we're making with our suppliers to back our forecast with confidence and cash. Ultimately, that's what helps us deliver the revenue capabilities we have.
Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Ross Seymore with Deutsche Bank. Please proceed.
Hi, guys. Thanks, Matt. Question, I wanted to go to the interconnect side of things. Matt, you talked about the growth rate going to, I think, over 70% this year. If I recall right, it was the beginning of this year, 30%, then 50%, and now 70%, so it's clearly accelerating. I guess the question is why would you think, other than just conservatism, that that would slow to kind of closer to, but still above the hyperscaler CapEx rate next year? Is that just conservatism or because everything that you rattled off before about the DCI side of things, AEC, 1.6T, the scale up, et cetera, all sounds like those are still very, very strong tailwinds. I just wanted to get a little more color as to what you're thinking in fiscal 2028 for that business.
I think the fact is this is where we are right now, Ross, and very encouraged to see as we've progressed, as you mentioned, from where we were starting probably around last September to now with the growth rate continuing to inch up as CapEx has gone up and also the attach rate of our interconnect products have gone up. The new initiatives, those businesses are ramping. We've had a lot of success across the board here, but this has been the star of the show here. I think when you look out to next year, I think this is where we are today. If you start building a bottoms-up model, you can see that there's definitely a possibility for a lot of upward bias because our traditional business in DSPs, obviously we talked about a big step up next year in 1.6T. That's higher content.
You have DCI ramping. You have the new initiatives, things like retimers and AECs, but also you have scale-up optics, which we're effectively calling at this point to be about $300 million, which is true NPO and CPO-based solutions. This is like the beginning of a major growth cycle for us. I think there's a lot of optionality is what I would say at the moment, Ross. I think today, net net, you look overall 16 fives where we're comfortable overall, but I think there's upward bias for sure. The trends continue.
Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Tore Svanberg with Stifel. Please proceed.
Yes. Thank you, and congrats on the record quarter. Matt, I was hoping to zoom in a little bit more on the interconnect business and specifically scale up. Obviously, a lot of that is in front of you. There's also a lot of different dynamics there, right? Whether it's copper, optical, MPO, CPO, copper. What has been surprising to you the last few months as far as what two or three products are you seeing the bigger upside from? Because obviously, it's a very dynamic market. Given your new growth forecast here, there must be a few that are worth highlighting. Thank you.
Yeah. Well, I'll start at the top. The good news is, as you said, you just rattled off a number of different technologies and there's an equal number more you didn't mention. We're in all of them. I think that's one of the unique advantages that we bring to the table is we have the absolute broadest range of connectivity and scale up and scale-out solutions for interconnect in the industry. I think as I was indicating to Ross, I think everything's got an upward bias to it. The area where I think the most intense activity has sort of emerged is, and I think it's been just a home run getting the Celestial team in here and combining them with our own very, very strong and capable optics team.
That combined team, we're able to go into customers now and outline full end-to-end solutions from XPU to switch with any type of interface and optical or copper connection between that the customer can envision and really optimize around that. That's why we mentioned we're seeing for next year not just the Celestial products ramping on scale of optics, but also Marvell products as well. I think that's an area that could bias upward. That's in the context of us presenting a very comprehensive total system solution. In the end, especially for this first generation, you're going to want to have these solutions bookended, Tore, and you're going to want to have the XPU integrate the same photonic element as the switch side.
We are able to walk in and show our capability on switches, our ability to integrate into XPUs or build the XPU, and then all the optics in between. It's a very, very powerful combination, and I think the end-to-end is getting a lot of attention. The fact is, we have the proven technology. It's not a PowerPoint. It's not a concept. I mean, we have 15 billion hours as an example of device data on four generations of silicon photonics already. We have 224 gig SerDes in production. We have die-to-die in production. We built switches for multiple generations that are reticle sized with high yield. This is like the most complex stuff you're going to do in the semiconductor industry, and we're able to simultaneously do it all and bring it to our customers.
If I were to point out a trend, which is kind of what you're getting at, it's that trend right now is how do we help our customers enable their scale up network for the future? This is like gen 1, ground zero. I mean, there's a lot of room to go here. That's what I'd say the most sort of intense discussions we're having in. We're very much investing to win here. That's why you see us, in some cases, betting on multiple standards or multiple technologies. We don't want to miss out, and we will pivot at the right time.
We'll follow our customers, we'll follow the market, but today we have a little bit of a blank sheet, and it's very refreshing to our customers because we don't just go in there with our agenda based on the one piece that we have and say, "Well, this is what we have. This is what we can offer you." We go in with, "Here's the technology that you need." It's real engineering. It's real proven silicon. It's real proof of concept that we can show. I think more to come on this one.
Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Srini Pajjuri with RBC Capital Markets. Please proceed.
Thank you. Matt, I want to zoom in on the switching side. I think you talked about scale-out switching doubling this year and potentially reaching $1 billion annualized run rate next year. I know it's a large market and you have relatively small share in that market. As you go from scale-out to scale up, you mentioned three different, I guess, eSUN, NVLink, and also UALink. It seems to me that could be even larger market and obviously it's all greenfield market for you. I'm just curious as to how you're thinking about that opportunity in 2028 and beyond. Thank you.
Thanks, Srini. You're right on the scale-out side. It's a large and established market. We're an emerging company there. I would just say though, I think it's a huge milestone to look out to next year and have line of sight to $1 billion of revenue here when if I go back five years ago when we were able to bring the Innovium team in, it was effectively a pre-revenue company or very little with, at that time, line of sight to $100 million, $150 million of revenue. That's gone really well if you look over the last five years, right? Just where we're heading. A lot of those assets and capabilities that we got from that are now directly being leveraged into scale-up networking, particularly obviously on the Ethernet side, on eSUN.
That, in our mind is a bigger opportunity from the standpoint that the market share isn't established yet. That's what I was referring to earlier in Tore's question. There's so many important architectural discussions going on, it's not just the switch, it really requires a very broad set of capabilities and track record for customers to bet on you here. I think the stakes are higher because we do continue to see the adoption of CPO and NPO technologies being much more robust and sticky inside the scale-up networks, which is just a lot more TAM for Marvell as well. You've got switch ASPs that are roughly the same, you've got a whole new emerging market segment where nobody's quite established the leadership position there. We think based on our set of assets and our strategy, we should do really well there.
All the numbers I've rattled off to everybody here, which is a lot, I get it, the concept is trying to give people visibility onto the different pieces of Marvell that you might not think of. On the scale up and on the switching side, that is not really in any numbers I'm talking about right now. Very little, nothing in the 16.5. Then the year after, we'll probably get some contribution, but that's never showed up in an Analyst Day we've done or any kind of discussion. That's all in front of us, and that's all upside, and I think it can be very meaningful over time. We'll see. Operator, we'll do one more question, and then I'll give some closing remarks, and we'll end the call.
Sounds good. Our last question comes from the line of Simon Leopold with Raymond James. Please proceed.
Thank you very much for taking the question. I am wondering, if we look at the fiscal 2028 outlook for the custom to double and the three drivers that you outlined, can you give us a little bit more color as to which of these is the biggest, or how to think about the contributions between existing customer expansion, the XPU attach, and then the new tier 1? Just trying to get a sense of relative size of each. Thanks.
Yeah. No problem. Thanks for the question. Last quarter, when we talked about it was about a third, a third, a third in those different buckets, the existing programs, XPU attach, and our new program. It's about the same. What's happened is what we said, it's going to more than double. All of those have sized up. I think across the board, I would say, all of our different custom programs, which again, I mentioned was quite a few when you add the XPU attach in there, every one of those has sized up and wants to be bigger for next year. It's a double plus, which is great, and I'd say it's roughly the same ratio. We'll know more, obviously, as we get through the year here and lock the production plan for next year and our allocation.
At the moment, everything wants to be more, and we will do that. We'll more than double the business from this year to next year in about the same increments in terms of growth. Thanks for the question. Operator, do you want to give some closing comments? You want to close the call first, then I'll do it? How do you want to do it?
No. I'll just close it out once you're finished.
Excellent. Okay. Thanks for your help today. All right, thanks everybody for joining. I appreciate it, appreciate the interest in the company. Marvell is in the middle of really an incredible growth period. We're seeing record demand, we're seeing record bookings the last few quarters. Our data center business is on fire, we're projecting accelerating revenue growth for this year and next year, already from a strong base. Basically, we were 46% data center growth last year. This year is 50%, next year is looking like 55%. It's only getting better. Team is doing an excellent job winning new designs, we can keep the growth engine humming for the foreseeable future. This is a company that was put together and purpose-built and going back almost 10 years, actually, in the making to get to this point.
We've had a lot of high-profile M&A and integrated that well, incredibly strong organic investment by Marvell engineers as well to build really a best-in-class leading portfolio across the board. This came up in some of the questions, I'll just touch on it. What really is resonating with our customers is we have all the pieces. We have the pieces that can help our customers architect their fully optimized AI infrastructure, that can be built on Marvell end-to-end technology. Having custom under one roof, high-speed optical interconnect, switching, leading edge SerDes and IO, all the things we talked about earlier in terms of our capacity, our scale, our ability to manufacture and yield in high volume, customers' ability to trust us to do that. Very exciting time for the company. It's been a little roller coaster over the last year.
The revenue's been up and to the right. There's been ups and downs along the way, and we have a very dedicated and loyal and committed employee base in this company. I want to thank all the Marvell employees that are listening and all the engineers in this company and everybody in every function who's working your butts off every day to get to where we've gotten to. Your focus and commitment is highly appreciated. Look, we're well on the way to be one of the big winners in this AI cycle. We know what we're good at, and we're going to keep doing that, keep our head down, keep executing, and keep driving it forward. We look forward to seeing all of you. I know there's a whole bunch of different investor events, bus tours, huge amount of people coming through here at Marvell.
I'll be in a lot of those meetings, but you'll also get a chance to see Chris and Willem, Sandeep, Ashish, and me. With that, I want to conclude the call. Thanks, operator, and thanks everybody for your interest in Marvell. Take care.
Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for your participation. This does conclude today's teleconference. Please disconnect your lines and have a wonderful day.