Marvell Technology was founded in 1995 by Sehat Sutardja, Weili Dai and Pantas Sutardja. Its first business was CMOS read-channel chips for hard disk drives, sold to drive makers such as Seagate and Western Digital. It went public on Nasdaq in 2000 and moved into Ethernet with the 2001 purchase of Galileo Technology.
Crisis and reset
By the mid-2010s Marvell was dealing with a $1.17 billion Carnegie Mellon patent verdict (settled for $750 million in 2016), slowing PC storage demand and an audit committee probe into revenue pull-ins. The founders left in 2016 and Matt Murphy, a Maxim Integrated veteran, became CEO.
The data infrastructure pivot
Murphy exited mobile chips and bought Cavium (about $6 billion, 2018), Aquantia and Avera Semi (2019), and Inphi (about $10 billion) and Innovium (2021). Those deals gave Marvell processors, custom ASIC teams, optical DSPs and Ethernet switches. Marvell sold automotive Ethernet to Infineon for $2.5 billion in 2025.
The AI era
Fiscal 2026 revenue rose 42% to $8.195 billion, with Data Center at 74%. In 2026 Marvell closed the roughly $3.25 billion Celestial AI deal, took a $2 billion investment from Nvidia tied to NVLink Fusion, and reported record Q2 fiscal 2027 revenue of $2.739 billion, 79% from Data Center.
