Marvell CEO: Trust with hyperscale customers powered 241% stock surge

In an interview on CNBC's "Mad Money" on Tuesday, Murphy said deepened relationships across the artificial intelligence ecosystem, including partnerships with Nvidia in March and Google in August, have driven the rally. Rival Broadcom's shares rose only 6.6% over the same period.

"In this market, these large hyperscale customers and the ecosystem around it, it's really based on trust," Murphy said. "I think trust has been a huge part of ... our brand and our credibility." He explained that hyperscalers need confidence that suppliers can deliver increasingly complex chips on time and at scale, a playbook that helped fuel AMD's turnaround under CEO Lisa Su.

"Can you trust the engineering team and the company is going to deliver the chip? Can you trust the management team that they're going to shoot you straight? Can you trust that the capacity and the supply is going to be there, and can you trust the CEO at the end of the day?" Murphy asked. That reputation, he said, allows Marvell to work across the AI ecosystem instead of depending on any single customer or chip architecture. Marvell provides custom silicon to all four major U.S. hyperscalers and sells its optical connectivity products broadly across the industry.

"We are basically the Switzerland of this entire market right now, we work with everybody," Murphy said. Those relationships have helped fuel explosive growth. Data center revenue is projected to rise 60% in fiscal 2027 and 61% in fiscal 2028, according to FactSet data cited by CNBC. Investors expect to hear more about long-term financial targets when Marvell holds an investor day in early October.

Marvell won a significant deal in August with a multi-year technology supply agreement with Google, which had long been viewed as Broadcom's most important custom-chip customer. Competition for hyperscaler business intensified on Tuesday when Amazon, a longtime Marvell customer, announced a partnership with rival Qualcomm. When CNBC's Jim Cramer asked about that deal, Murphy said, "I think it's a competitive market. We're very confident in our position and how we've evolved in this market across all the U.S. hyperscalers and the entire ecosystem."