Inside the Rack, Between the BuildingsNarrow moat

Marvell's interconnect products address two distinct distances, and both are expanding. Inside the rack and across the data-center floor, accelerators need extraordinary bandwidth over short runs — the domain of high-speed electrical links and increasingly of optics as copper runs out of reach. Between buildings and between sites, coherent optical technology carries traffic over kilometres.

The second of these has become newly interesting. AI clusters have outgrown single sites, so operators now link data centers into one training system — a problem that looks like telecommunications and uses the coherent optics Marvell has sold to carriers for years. A business built for telecom networks turns out to be exactly what hyperscalers need for site-to-site AI traffic.

The risk in both domains is that Marvell is selling components into someone else's system architecture, and system architectures change. Watch which interconnect standards win at each distance, and whether Marvell has silicon in them. Being on the wrong side of a standard is how component companies lose franchises they appeared to dominate. Both distances now sit inside a data-center segment that passed $6 billion in fiscal 2026¹.