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Calling Marvell an "AI chip maker" is bizarre. They're mostly a networking company, with a fair bit of storage stuff, too. Like any tech company these days, the

Calling Marvell an "AI chip maker" is bizarre. They're mostly a networking company, with a fair bit of storage stuff, too. Like any tech company these days, they're trying to jump on the AI bandwagon, but that hasn't actually changed what markets they're operating in.

dlcarrier 2y ago
They are mostly a chip maker though, both directly selling semiconductors and selling products based on them. Sure, they call their processors an AI product, but so do Intel, AMD, and pretty much every other ARM licensee. The real kicker is that they picked up their ARM license from Intel, when they bought the XScale line (now Armada) in 2006.
- wtallis 2y ago
  It's been a long time since Marvell was seeing any lingering benefits from that XScale acquisition. Their more compute-oriented products owe a lot more to the Cavium acquisition.
lolinder 2y ago
> that hasn't actually changed what markets they're operating in. Actually, if you look at their quarterly report, the breakdown of their revenue by market has changed dramatically in the last year. Revenue from the data center market went from 36% to 71% of their revenue, a change which they attribute to AI creating demand. Meanwhile networking dropped from 24% to 10% of their revenue, and other categories have gone down as well. From the report: > Net revenue in the third quarter of fiscal 2025 was $1.5 billion and was 7% higher than net revenue in the third quarter of fiscal 2024. This was due to a 98% increase in sales from the data center end market compared to the three months ended October 28, 2023. The increase was partially offset by decreases in sales from the carrier infrastructure end market by 73%, from the enterprise networking end market by 44%, from the consumer end market by 43% and from the automotive/industrial end market by 22%. > We have seen strong revenue growth from our data center end market, driven by robust demand for our electro-optics and custom compute products from AI applications. https://app.quotemedia.com/data/downloadFiling?webmasterId=101533&ref=318767044&type=PDF&symbol=MRVL&cdn=d112c955f290337b28e70dd8f5bc9923&companyName=Marvell+Technology+Inc.&formType=10-Q&dateFiled=2024-12-04 https://app.quotemedia.com/data/downloadFiling?webmasterId=1...
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- wtallis 2y ago
  Take a look at https://www.marvell.com/solutions/data-center.html https://www.marvell.com/solutions/data-center.html They've sprinkled "AI" everywhere above the fold, but all the actual products they're talking about are still networking products. > Meanwhile networking dropped from 24% to 10% of their revenue, and other categories have gone down as well. Enterprise networking is a category they report as dropping from 19% to 10% year-over-year for a three month period. I think you got the 24% from an incomparable column reporting on a nine month period. But either way, enterprise networking is obviously just a small subset of all their networking business. Marvell is clearly still primarily a networking business. AI is driving demand for some of their networking products (or at least, that's what they're attributing the demand to), but that's not the same thing as Marvell actually making products that are doing AI, or selling such products in enough volume to double their datacenter revenue.
  - lolinder 2y ago
    > Enterprise networking is a category they report as dropping from 19% to 10% year-over-year for a three month period. I think you got the 24% from an incomparable column reporting on a nine month period. Oops, you're right, the comparison I meant to make was 24% to 12% over a 9 month period. > But either way, enterprise networking is obviously just a small subset of all their networking business. Is it, though? That table [0] puts everything "consumer" into a chunk that's now only 6% of their revenue. Carrier infrastructure is another 6%. Together that adds up to roughly equal to the enterprise networking row, but that's still a tiny amount compared to the data center revenue. Are you saying that "data center" includes a lot of networking equipment that isn't filed under "enterprise networking"? [0] Looking at page 9
    - wtallis 2y ago
      > Are you saying that "data center" includes a lot of networking equipment that isn't filed under "enterprise networking"? Yes, exactly. "Enterprise" and "data center" are treated as disjoint segments by many tech companies, even though both tend to refer to rackmount hardware. That's why I linked to Marvell's own page describing their data center products, so you could see for yourself that they are indeed networking products: switches, PHYs, NICs, etc. All of the categories under the "Net revenue by end market" table are comprised primarily of networking products: "Data center" is mostly networking stuff, "Enterprise networking" is obviously networking stuff, "Carrier infrastructure" is where you find networking stuff with the now-passé "5G" buzzword, "Consumer" is probably mostly networking but might actually be the segment with the lowest proportion of networking products (though Marvell's SSD controllers aren't too common these days in consumer SSDs. Also, Realtek has recently started eating away at Marvell's Aquantia revenue for 2.5Gb and 5Gb Ethernet in consumer products.) "Automotive/industrial" is primarily about automotive Ethernet.
baxtr 2y ago
I'm sure they did crypto for a while, too.

dlcarrier 2y ago

They are mostly a chip maker though, both directly selling semiconductors and selling products based on them. Sure, they call their processors an AI product, but so do Intel, AMD, and pretty much every other ARM licensee. The real kicker is that they picked up their ARM license from Intel, when they bought the XScale line (now Armada) in 2006.

wtallis 2y ago
It's been a long time since Marvell was seeing any lingering benefits from that XScale acquisition. Their more compute-oriented products owe a lot more to the Cavium acquisition.

lolinder 2y ago

> that hasn't actually changed what markets they're operating in. Actually, if you look at their quarterly report, the breakdown of their revenue by market has changed dramatically in the last year. Revenue from the data center market went from 36% to 71% of their revenue, a change which they attribute to AI creating demand. Meanwhile networking dropped from 24% to 10% of their revenue, and other categories have gone down as well. From the report: > Net revenue in the third quarter of fiscal 2025 was $1.5 billion and was 7% higher than net revenue in the third quarter of fiscal 2024. This was due to a 98% increase in sales from the data center end market compared to the three months ended October 28, 2023. The increase was partially offset by decreases in sales from the carrier infrastructure end market by 73%, from the enterprise networking end market by 44%, from the consumer end market by 43% and from the automotive/industrial end market by 22%. > We have seen strong revenue growth from our data center end market, driven by robust demand for our electro-optics and custom compute products from AI applications. https://app.quotemedia.com/data/downloadFiling?webmasterId=101533&ref=318767044&type=PDF&symbol=MRVL&cdn=d112c955f290337b28e70dd8f5bc9923&companyName=Marvell+Technology+Inc.&formType=10-Q&dateFiled=2024-12-04 https://app.quotemedia.com/data/downloadFiling?webmasterId=1...

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
wtallis 2y ago
Take a look at https://www.marvell.com/solutions/data-center.html https://www.marvell.com/solutions/data-center.html They've sprinkled "AI" everywhere above the fold, but all the actual products they're talking about are still networking products. > Meanwhile networking dropped from 24% to 10% of their revenue, and other categories have gone down as well. Enterprise networking is a category they report as dropping from 19% to 10% year-over-year for a three month period. I think you got the 24% from an incomparable column reporting on a nine month period. But either way, enterprise networking is obviously just a small subset of all their networking business. Marvell is clearly still primarily a networking business. AI is driving demand for some of their networking products (or at least, that's what they're attributing the demand to), but that's not the same thing as Marvell actually making products that are doing AI, or selling such products in enough volume to double their datacenter revenue.
- lolinder 2y ago
  > Enterprise networking is a category they report as dropping from 19% to 10% year-over-year for a three month period. I think you got the 24% from an incomparable column reporting on a nine month period. Oops, you're right, the comparison I meant to make was 24% to 12% over a 9 month period. > But either way, enterprise networking is obviously just a small subset of all their networking business. Is it, though? That table [0] puts everything "consumer" into a chunk that's now only 6% of their revenue. Carrier infrastructure is another 6%. Together that adds up to roughly equal to the enterprise networking row, but that's still a tiny amount compared to the data center revenue. Are you saying that "data center" includes a lot of networking equipment that isn't filed under "enterprise networking"? [0] Looking at page 9
  - wtallis 2y ago
    > Are you saying that "data center" includes a lot of networking equipment that isn't filed under "enterprise networking"? Yes, exactly. "Enterprise" and "data center" are treated as disjoint segments by many tech companies, even though both tend to refer to rackmount hardware. That's why I linked to Marvell's own page describing their data center products, so you could see for yourself that they are indeed networking products: switches, PHYs, NICs, etc. All of the categories under the "Net revenue by end market" table are comprised primarily of networking products: "Data center" is mostly networking stuff, "Enterprise networking" is obviously networking stuff, "Carrier infrastructure" is where you find networking stuff with the now-passé "5G" buzzword, "Consumer" is probably mostly networking but might actually be the segment with the lowest proportion of networking products (though Marvell's SSD controllers aren't too common these days in consumer SSDs. Also, Realtek has recently started eating away at Marvell's Aquantia revenue for 2.5Gb and 5Gb Ethernet in consumer products.) "Automotive/industrial" is primarily about automotive Ethernet.

baxtr 2y ago

I'm sure they did crypto for a while, too.