Marvell Technologies grows faster than Nvidia and AMD in Q1, capturing significant data center infrastructure market share.

Among the top 10 largest fabless chip designers, Marvell Technology emerged as the fastest growing in the first quarter, with semiconductor revenue surging 72 percent to $1.4 billion. This outpaced the growth of more prominent competitors: AMD increased revenue by 71 percent to nearly $5.9 billion, Nvidia grew 53 percent to $7.9 billion, and Qualcomm expanded 52 percent to $9.5 billion. Though these larger companies captured more headlines through chips fueling supercomputers and mobile devices, Marvell's faster growth rate demonstrated the strength of its strategic focus on infrastructure-oriented markets.

Silicon Valley-based Marvell, operating since the mid-1990s, designs chips for networking, storage, and compute applications. The company shifted its datacenter strategy in 2020 when it stopped producing mass-market, Arm-based CPUs for datacenters, instead concentrating on data processing units (DPUs) and security chips. These products now serve datacenters and cloud infrastructure as well as enterprise, automotive, and telecom markets. The rapid growth in the first quarter was directly attributable to the Innovium switch ASIC business, which Marvell acquired for $1.1 billion the previous year, contributing 125 percent annual growth to the company's datacenter revenue.

Innovium specializes in high-bandwidth, low-latency Ethernet switch ASICs designed primarily for cloud service providers and hyperscale companies with demanding networking requirements. Operating under Marvell's Prestera brand name, these Ethernet switch ASICs compete against comparable products including Intel's Tofino, Broadcom's Trident and Tomahawk, Cisco Systems' SiliconOne, and Nvidia's Spectrum. The acquisition's impact proved substantial: datacenter products overall grew 131 percent and accounted for 44 percent of total revenue in the quarter, according to the company's first-quarter earnings report.

Reflecting on the company's transformation, Marvell's president and CEO Matt Murphy stated: "With 88 percent of our overall revenue derived from data infrastructure, we are confident that our unique secular growth drivers in cloud, 5G, and auto, will continue to help drive sustainable long-term growth." Meanwhile, Cirrus Logic, an Austin, Texas-based semiconductor firm specializing in low-power audio and high-performance mixed-signal processing chips, achieved 67 percent revenue growth to $490 million in the first quarter, ranking third among the top 10 fabless designers. TrendForce attributed this growth to the company's acquisition of Lion Semiconductor the previous year, which bolstered its mixed-signal business. It should be noted that TrendForce's data tracks only semiconductor revenue, so the figures may not match total revenue disclosed by individual companies—Qualcomm's figures include only its Qualcomm Technologies business, and Broadcom's exclude software business sales.