Marvell Technology’s market capitalization briefly rose above $100 billion this past week.

Matt Murphy has no interest in running a chip company 10 times the size of his current one. It is the smarter move, and actually the more ambitious one. 

Murphy, who has served as chief executive officer of Marvell Technology since 2016, has been among the few names floated as potential replacements for the recently oustedPat Gelsinger at Intel’s corner office. That led to the rare sight of a CEO using his own earnings call to deny that he is on the market.

“I am all in,” he said on Marvell’s Dec. 3 call, the day after Intel announced Gelsinger’s exit and various media outlets reported Murphy as a candidate. “The company is outstanding. The technology is best-in-class. I can’t think of a better place to work than Marvell.” 

His timing was good. A strong earnings report and news of an expanded relationship with Amazon lit up Marvell’s stock, which had already risen 60% for the year at the start of the week. The shares have jumped another 18% since Tuesday’s report, putting Marvell’s market capitalization briefly above $100 billion for the first time ever (it was around $5 billion when Murphy took the job).

The latest gains have even put Marvell’s market cap ahead of much-beleaguered Intel, which still generates 10 times as much annual revenue. 

Marvell’s recent trajectory suggests that the revenue gap will continue to narrow. The explosive growth of its data center business has finally reached a point where it can more fully offset weakness in the company’s more legacy segments, which sell chips used in goods such as telecommunications gear, cable TV boxes and autos.

Data center sales nearly doubled year over year to $1.1 billion in the just-ended quarter, and Marvell’s projection for the current period indicates the company will end its fiscal year in January with the data center unit encompassing about 72% of its total revenue, up from 40% in the previous year. 

The next year is looking bright as well. Marvell’s latest deal with Amazon is a five-year “multigenerational” agreement that has Marvell helping Amazon design its own artificial intelligence chips. Amazon, which runs the world’s largest cloud computing service, has been expanding its internal chip efforts significantly, in part to reduce its reliance on Nvidia for crucial AI components. Amazon announced the next generation of its largest AI chip, called Trainium, at its annual developers conference this week. Analysts believe Trainium will play a role in Marvell’s AI custom revenue more than doubling in the next fiscal year ending January of 2026. 

That is expected to help propel Marvell’s annual revenue to more than $8 billion in fiscal 2026, up 40% from what is expected for this year, according to consensus estimates from Visible Alpha. In addition, 20% growth is expected for the following year, when Marvell expects to be in production of custom AI chips for another unnamed big tech customer that analysts believe to be Microsoft. Analyst Mark Lipacis of Evercore ISI projects that the industry for custom AI chips will reach $30 billion to $50 billion in sales by 2030. In a note to clients last week, he said Marvell “has the potential to capture one-third of that market.”

What could spoil the party? Like Nvidia, Marvell has significant exposure to booming AI investments that makes the company vulnerable to any downturns in that spending. That could happen if the AI services propagated by tech giants and their business customers fail to catch on with users. The same big tech buyers could even put a temporary pause on spending to absorb equipment already purchased. Such “digestion” periods have long been common in the data center market. But with its stock now trading nearly 45 times forward earnings—a 21% premium to Nvidia’s multiple—Marvell isn’t priced for the slightest of speed bumps.

Murphy isn’t worried. “We’ll see digestion at some point,” he said in an interview, adding that AI is only part of what is driving investment in so-called accelerated computing systems. His 30 years in the chip business have also acquainted him well with the industry’s brutal cycles. “We know it’s not going to be a straight line over the next 10 years,” he said. 

The next two alone should keep him busy enough.