Marvell Technology (MRVL) Stock on December 8, 2025: AI Megadeal, Microsoft Risk and New Price Targets Drive Volatile Outlook

Marvell Technology, Inc. (NASDAQ: MRVL) enters Monday, December 8, 2025 as one of Wall Street’s loudest AI-infrastructure stories — and one of its more complicated ones.

Over the past two weeks, the chip designer has ripped almost 30% higher on the back of record earnings, a multibillion‑dollar acquisition in optical AI networking, and a wave of analyst upgrades. ^[1]

At the same time, the stock is now digesting three big, mood‑shaping headlines:

A $3.25 billion deal to acquire photonics startup Celestial AI, with management targeting up to $1 billion in annualized revenue from the platform by fiscal 2029. ^[2]
Reports that Microsoft is in talks to shift custom chip design work from Marvell to Broadcom, raising new questions about customer concentration risk. ^[3]
A pre‑market drop on December 8 after Marvell was reportedly snubbed in the latest S&P 500 reshuffle, despite recent AI momentum. ^[4]

Overlay all of that with a still‑demanding valuation and you get a stock that’s both AI‑supercharged and very sensitive to any change in expectations.

Where MRVL Stock Stands on December 8, 2025

The last regular trading session before Monday’s open was Friday, December 5, when MRVL:

Closed at $98.91, up about 0.7% on the day.
Traded in a wide intraday band between $97.31 and $102.64.
Saw heavy volume of roughly 22.2 million shares. ^[5]

Quant service StockInvest notes that Marvell has risen in eight of the last ten sessions and is up nearly 29% over the past two weeks, putting the stock near the top of a steep short‑term rising trend. ^[6]

Despite that run, Marvell is still down low double‑digits year‑to‑date, depending on the source, as the recent rally only partially reverses a rough first half of 2025. ^[7]

Key levels and context:

52‑week range: roughly $47–$127, underscoring how volatile the AI‑chip trade has been. ^[8]
Market cap: around the mid‑$80 billion range at prices just under $100. TechStock²
Short interest: approx. 4–5% of float, or ~37 million shares, with about 2 days to cover, enough to matter but not extreme. TechStock²+1

On December 8 pre‑market, a Reuters‑sourced headline via TradingView reported MRVL down about 3–4% to the mid‑$90s after S&P Dow Jones Indices announced changes to the S&P 500 that did not include Marvell. ^[9]

Real‑time quote feeds still show the stock oscillating in the mid‑to‑high $90s on Monday morning, roughly in line with Friday’s close, reflecting a tug‑of‑war between strong AI optimism and index/celebrity‑stock disappointment. ^[10]

Record Q3 FY2026: Marvell’s AI Data Center Pivot Is Real

The current move in MRVL really started with Q3 FY2026 earnings, released on December 2, 2025.

From the official results:

Net revenue:$2.075 billion, a 37% year‑on‑year increase, and slightly above the midpoint of guidance.
GAAP gross margin:51.6%; non‑GAAP gross margin:59.7%.
GAAP EPS:$2.20, boosted by the sale of the automotive Ethernet business.
Non‑GAAP EPS:$0.76, up sharply from the prior year. ^[11]

The data center business is the star:

Data center revenue was about $1.52 billion, roughly 73% of total sales, and grew ~38% year‑on‑year. ^[12]

Marvell also completed the previously announced $2.5 billion sale of its automotive Ethernet business to Infineon, kicking its auto exposure to the curb and doubling down on data center, cloud and networking. ^[13]

Third‑party coverage paints a consistent picture:

Zacks and Nasdaq summarize the quarter as a slight beat on both revenue and EPS, with EPS up around 75–80% year‑on‑year. ^[14]
An Investing.com transcript review highlights “robust growth in Q3 FY2026” driven by AI and high‑speed connectivity, and praises the decision to focus on AI/data center and divest auto Ethernet as aligned with industry trends. ^[15]

Q4 and FY Guidance

Management didn’t just look in the rear‑view mirror; they floored the guidance pedal:

Q4 FY2026 revenue: $2.2 billion ± 5%, above pre‑earnings consensus. ^[16]
The company expects full‑year revenue growth above 40%, largely driven by AI‑centric data center demand. ^[17]

In its analysis of the quarter, Futurum Group previously framed Marvell as “the second‑largest player in XPUs” (custom accelerators) after the industry leaders, while warning that competition from Broadcom and others is intensifying — a tension that’s now very visible in the Microsoft headlines. ^[18]

Celestial AI: A $3.25 Billion Bet on Optical Scale‑Up for AI

The second big catalyst is Marvell’s acquisition of Celestial AI, announced the same week as earnings.

Per Marvell’s own press release and Reuters coverage, the deal looks like this: ^[19]

Headline value:$3.25 billion — $1.0 billion in cash plus about 27.2 million Marvell shares (~$2.25 billion).
Earn‑out: Potential additional 27.2 million shares, worth up to another $2.25 billion, if aggressive revenue milestones through 2029 are hit.
Technology: Celestial’s “Photonic Fabric” optical interconnect platform, which aims to move data between accelerators (XPUs) and memory using light instead of copper, for higher bandwidth and better energy efficiency in AI data centers.
Strategic goal: Dominate “scale‑up” connectivity — the ultra‑fast links tying hundreds of accelerators together inside and across racks — complementing Marvell’s existing strength in scale‑out networking.

Marvell expects Celestial AI to contribute meaningfully only late in the decade:

Management is targeting a $500 million annualized revenue run‑rate by Q4 FY2028,
Doubling to about $1 billion by Q4 FY2029. ^[20]

This is classic “spend now, harvest later” strategy. In exchange for a multi‑billion‑dollar deal and future share dilution, Marvell gains:

A differentiated optical scale‑up platform delivering up to 16 Tbps bandwidth in a single chiplet — roughly 10× the capacity of today’s high‑end 1.6T ports. ^[21]
Deep alignment with hyperscalers — the press release quotes AWS’s Dave Brown praising optical interconnects as central to future AI infrastructure. ^[22]
A new total addressable market for optical scale‑up interconnects that management and analysts peg around $10 billion over time. ^[23]

Zacks and other commentators argue that the Celestial AI deal positions Marvell as a more direct competitor to Broadcom and Nvidia in next‑generation AI data‑center plumbing, especially co‑packaged optics that sit right next to compute dies. ^[24]

Fresh News on December 8: S&P 500 Snub, AWS Tailwinds and Fund Flows

1. S&P 500 Inclusion Snub

A Reuters dispatch carried on TradingView reports that Marvell shares fell around 3.4% pre‑market to roughly $95.6 on Monday after S&P Dow Jones Indices announced new S&P 500 additions that did not include MRVL. ^[25]

Given how many traders love the “S&P 500 inclusion” story as a liquidity and prestige catalyst, being left out — at least for now — is a psychological dent, even if it changes nothing about AI fundamentals.

2. AWS and the AI Super‑Cycle

While index nerds sulk, AWS is quietly helping the bull case.

A Business Insider article summarizing a Bank of America note on “5 chip stocks set to be the big winners of Amazon’s latest AI push” includes Marvell among the beneficiaries of the AWS re:Invent announcements, citing its cloud‑ and AI‑focused connectivity portfolio. ^[26]

Coupled with the Amazon warrant in the Celestial deal — granting Amazon the right to buy Marvell shares tied to future photonics purchases — the AWS relationship is increasingly central to the MRVL story. ^[27]

3. Big Funds Quietly Adding

Two new MarketBeat pieces dated December 8 highlight incremental but notable institutional moves: ^[28]

CalPERS increased its stake by 6.2% in Q2 to about 1.43 million shares, now worth roughly $111 million and representing 0.17% of the company.
Baker Avenue Asset Management lifted its position 6.8% to 212,356 shares, valued around $16.4 million.

Both articles remind readers that Marvell recently beat expectations, guided strongly for Q4 and authorized a massive $5 billion share repurchase program, roughly 7–8% of shares outstanding. ^[29]

Another note from Fintel, republished by Nasdaq, estimates that 2,188 institutions collectively hold about 775 million MRVL shares, with an average portfolio weight of 0.40%. The put/call ratio around 1.2 suggests meaningful options hedging despite bullish fundamentals. ^[30]

4. SoftBank’s Earlier Interest

For extra spice, a Stocktwits/Bloomberg recap from November 6 revealed that SoftBank explored acquiring Marvell earlier in 2025, considering a potential merger with ARM and what might have been one of the largest semiconductor deals ever. Talks ultimately went nowhere, but the episode underlines how central Marvell has become to the AI infrastructure stack. ^[31]

There is no current M&A deal on the table, but the history matters for sentiment.

What Wall Street Thinks: Ratings, Targets and Forecasts

On December 8, the sell‑side consensus is decisively bullish, even though some analysts have valuation concerns.

Consensus Rating and Price Targets

Different aggregators disagree on the exact number, but they rhyme:

StockAnalysis: 32 covering analysts rate MRVL a “Buy”, with an average 12‑month price target of $110.66 — about 12% upside from Friday’s close. Target range: $67–$156. ^[32]
WallStreetZen: For 45 analysts, the average target is about $112.65 (≈14% upside), with a Buy consensus and top‑tier analysts at firms like Roth, Piper Sandler and Evercore setting bull‑case targets in the $135–$156 range. ^[33]
Fintel/Nasdaq: A separate dataset calculates a revised average one‑year target of $115.89, up 26% from mid‑November estimates and implying ~17% upside vs. a reference price near $99. ^[34]
TickerNerd/Zacks aggregation: 47 analysts yield a median target of $120, with 31 Buys, 13 Holds and no Sells, implying over 20% upside at ~$99. ^[35]

The directional takeaway: Wall Street expects more upside, but not a moonshot, and the range of outcomes (mid‑$60s to mid‑$150s) is very wide — a nice visual of how uncertain long‑term AI infrastructure earnings still are.

Earnings and Revenue Forecasts

On the fundamental side, consensus models look almost cartoonishly steep:

Fiscal 2026 revenue (current year): about $8.3 billion, up 44% from roughly $5.8 billion the prior year. ^[36]
Fiscal 2027 revenue: around $9.7 billion, implying 16% growth on top of that. ^[37]
EPS is projected to jump from negative GAAP last year to around $2.87 this year and $3.44 next year, a nearly 20% year‑on‑year increase. ^[38]

Reuters notes that Marvell itself is guiding for about $10 billion in revenue next fiscal year, including 25% growth in data center and 20% growth in custom chips, broadly consistent with the Street’s models. ^[39]

WallStreetZen’s multi‑year view has EPS around $4.25 by 2028 and revenue approaching $11–12 billion, before layering on any upside from Celestial’s optical platform beyond the initial run‑rate targets. ^[40]

Quant‑driven site StockInvest, using purely technical and statistical signals, projects roughly 24% upside over the next three months, with a 90% projected range between about $99 and $125, while warning that the stock is trading near the top of its short‑term channel and could see pullbacks. ^[41]

Microsoft–Broadcom Rumors: The Bearish Counter‑Narrative

Everything so far sounds like “AI fairy tale with lasers.” The main bearish plot twist is the Microsoft story.

Several outlets — including TechStrong, TipRanks and Longbridge — summarizing a report from The Information say that: ^[42]

Microsoft is in talks with Broadcom to take over custom AI chip design work that has been handled by Marvell.
If a deal is finalized, Broadcom could replace Marvell as Microsoft’s main custom‑chip partner in that segment.

This is not yet confirmed by any of the companies, but it hits right at one of Marvell’s known vulnerabilities: customer concentration.

Marvell has repeatedly highlighted Amazon and Microsoft as key hyperscaler customers for its custom AI silicon. ^[43]
An earlier Insider Monkey recap of Brown Advisory’s investor letter noted that the stock had already suffered a sharp sell‑off earlier this year over fears of losing content on Amazon’s next‑generation program, only to rebound after management reassured investors about data center revenue growth. ^[44]

In other words, investors have been here before: the bull case is that Marvell is a central vendor in custom AI chips and networking; the bear case is that the same concentration makes it vulnerable if any big customer shifts even a portion of its design wins elsewhere.

If the Microsoft–Broadcom story is confirmed and significant in size, it could pressure the medium‑term outlook for Marvell’s custom ASIC segment, even if the broader AI demand tide remains high.

Valuation Check: Pricey, But Not Peak‑AI Euphoria

What are investors paying for this roller coaster?

Based on Friday’s close near $99 and consensus estimates, multiple data providers put Marvell’s valuation roughly at: TechStock²+2StockAnalysis+2

Trailing P/E: around 35×.
Forward P/E: roughly 25–30×, depending on which EPS estimate you use.
Price‑to‑sales (TTM): approximately 11×.

TS²’s pre‑market preview and various valuation trackers emphasize that while this is far from cheap, it isn’t totally out of line with a company growing revenue north of 40% and repositioning itself as an AI infrastructure linchpin. TechStock²+2StockAnalysis+2

On the flip side:

Marvell is still down year‑to‑date, which some commentators at Investopedia and others attribute to earlier skepticism about AI demand durability and customer concentration risks. ^[45]
The stock has already re‑rated sharply in the last two weeks, so any stumble in execution, delays in Celestial integration, or confirmation of a Microsoft shift could hit a richly‑valued multiple hard. ^[46]

At current levels, the core bull logic is essentially:

“If Marvell actually delivers ~25%+ data center growth next year, ramps custom AI chips with Amazon and others, and executes on Celestial, today’s multiple is tolerable.”

The core bear logic is:

“Too many things have to go right, with very concentrated customers, in a brutally competitive space where Broadcom, Nvidia and others are also hungry.”

Both sides have a point.

Key Things for MRVL Investors to Watch After December 8

For anyone tracking Marvell from here, the next set of checkpoints is fairly clear:

Microsoft clarity
- Confirmation, denial, or clarification from Microsoft, Broadcom or Marvell about the custom chip design shift will likely move the stock. ^[47]
Customer wins and hyperscaler commentary
- Further details on Amazon’s photonics roadmap, warrant exercises, and Celestial AI design‑wins will help investors gauge whether Marvell is gaining net share in AI infrastructure, even if some work shifts elsewhere. ^[48]
Celestial AI integration milestones
- Watch for timelines on co‑packaged optics platforms, tape‑outs, and early revenue ramps well before the official FY2028–29 targets; these will shape whether the earn‑out math looks realistic. ^[49]
Next guidance update
- Any tweak to the $10 billion revenue / 25% data center growth / 20% custom chip growth outlook will echo loudly in models and price targets. ^[50]
Index and fund flows
- The S&P 500 snub could be temporary. If Marvell’s market cap, liquidity and profitability stay on course, future rebalancings might still bring index inclusion — a medium‑term technical catalyst. ^[51]

Bottom Line on MRVL Stock as of December 8, 2025

On December 8, 2025, Marvell Technology sits at the intersection of:

Explosive AI‑driven growth (record Q3, aggressive guidance, Celestial AI photonics, AWS validation), and
Heightened execution and concentration risk (Microsoft–Broadcom reports, intense competition from Broadcom/Nvidia/others, rich valuation, and post‑rally technical stretch).

Most analysts still see double‑digit percentage upside over the next year, but the spread of targets and the sudden S&P‑ and Microsoft‑driven wobbles show how fragile the narrative can be when expectations are this high. ^[52]

For investors, MRVL today is less a sleepy chip stock and more a leveraged bet on the AI data‑center plumbing layer: photonics, custom accelerators, and hyperscaler relationships. That makes it one of the most interesting — and one of the more finely balanced — AI infrastructure trades going into 2026.