⚠ Credo, Astera and the SpecialistsModerate threat

Marvell's interconnect business is attacked not by another diversified semiconductor company but by specialists. Credo competes in the electrical interconnect and active cable market that sits alongside optics; Astera Labs builds the connectivity silicon that links accelerators to memory and to each other inside a rack. Both grew rapidly on the same AI build-out.

Specialists have real advantages in this fight. They can commit their entire engineering organisation to one problem, move faster on a single standard, and price aggressively to win a design because they have no broader portfolio to protect. Hyperscalers, meanwhile, are happy to encourage them for the same second-source reasons that benefit Marvell in custom silicon.

Marvell's answer is breadth — a customer can take DSPs, switching silicon and custom compute from one supplier with one set of interfaces that are known to work together — and the scale to invest through a cycle. Watch data-center revenue growth split between custom and interconnect where management discloses it, and watch gross margin: specialists winning on price show up as margin pressure before they show up as lost revenue — Marvell ran a 35.3% non-GAAP operating margin in fiscal 2026¹, which is the level to watch.