Marvell booked $2.17 billion in datacenter sales for its fiscal Q2 2027, ended August 1 — up 45.7 percent year on year — and roughly $1.4 billion of the AI portion of that came from electro-optics, not the custom chips that grab the headlines.

That's the striking arithmetic buried in Marvell's latest quarter. The company has big, splashy custom silicon deals with Amazon Web Services, Google, and other hyperscalers. But the optical components and switching that stitch AI clusters together still drive the bulk of the money.

Total revenue for the quarter hit $2.74 billion, up 36.5 percent, with operating income of $460 million, up 58.5 percent, and net income of $308 million, up 58.1 percent. Marvell holds $3.93 billion in the bank, cash it will need to fund its chip-shepherding obligations for customers.

What does the datacenter mix actually look like?

Marvell stopped reporting its old divisions explicitly after Q3 fiscal 2026, so the fine-grained numbers come from external modeling rather than company disclosure. On that basis, AI-related datacenter revenue reached an estimated $1.82 billion in the quarter, up 90.9 percent year on year — a 23.6X multiple over three years.

The split within that AI business tells the real story:

• Electro-optical components: roughly $1.4 billion, up 97.2 percent — the dominant AI revenue line
• Custom AI XPUs, including AWS's Graviton program: around $425 million, up 43.1 percent, but down slightly sequentially
• Other datacenter products sold outside the AI customer set: about $347 million, down 28.4 percent

The custom XPU number still beat expectations. Marvell had told Wall Street a few quarters ago to expect roughly 20 percent growth; it delivered 43.1 percent.

Datacenter now accounts for 79.3 percent of total sales. Add legacy enterprise networking — an estimated $266 million, up 37.4 percent — and the figure climbs to 89 percent. The remaining legacy businesses aimed at carriers, consumer, and industrial customers brought in a combined $567.8 million, up 10.1 percent. Marvell barely mentions them anymore, lumping them into a single group, much as Nvidia folds everything outside datacenter into "Edge Computing."

How did Marvell get here?

Back in Q1 fiscal 2024, as the GenAI boom was just starting, Marvell's entire AI business was around $77 million — perhaps $12 million in early custom ASICs through the AWS Graviton deal and $66 million in electro-optics.

Since Q2 fiscal 2021, the datacenter business has grown 8.1X while the legacy chip businesses have grown just 1.3X over the same period. The acquisitions that built that trajectory — IBM's custom chip business out of GlobalFoundries, Inphi, and Celestial AI — plus the divestiture of the automotive chip business to Infineon put Marvell all-in on GenAI. Don't be surprised, the analysis suggests, if Marvell sells off further divisions to raise cash and sharpen focus.

There's a disclosure gap, though. The datacenter business is now so large that analysts want it broken into reported segments, and the SEC's loose principle — that companies should report the way they run the business internally — may eventually force the issue. Error bars on estimated division sales keep getting fuzzier unless Marvell breaks it out at its upcoming financial analyst day.

What did Marvell guide for the rest of the year?

CEO and chairman Matt Murphy raised guidance across the board. For Q3 fiscal 2027, Marvell expects around $3.15 billion in sales, up 51.8 percent year on year and 15 percent sequentially, with the datacenter business growing about 20 percent sequentially and roughly 75 percent year on year. Murphy said growth will accelerate further in Q4.

Notably, the first revenues from Google's recently expanded partnership with Marvell land in Q3 F2027.

Murphy lifted the full fiscal 2027 revenue outlook to $12 billion from $11.5 billion a quarter ago, implying Q4 F2027 revenue around $3.7 billion, up 66.4 percent year on year. By rough math, custom CPUs and XPUs should represent about $2 billion in fiscal 2027 sales, growing around 33 percent — again ahead of the 20 percent Marvell had flagged earlier.

For fiscal 2028, Murphy raised guidance by $1.5 billion to $18 billion, a 50 percent growth rate, and said datacenter would grow by more than 60 percent. Within that, scaled network components for UALink, ESUN, and NVSwitch networks plus the Celestial AI optical interposer should contribute on the order of $300 million, with Celestial AI's hardware at about $150 million. The custom CPU and XPU business is expected to more than double in fiscal 2028 and grow even faster in 2029, helped by the Google deal and chip projects Marvell is shepherding for AWS and others.

Optics still rule the Marvell AI story today. But with custom compute set to double next fiscal year, the balance between the two is where Marvell's competitive position against Nvidia and alongside Broadcom will be decided.