Marvell Technology reported a 37% year-over-year increase in net revenues for its latest fiscal quarter, results that were driven by an even greater surge in data center revenues.

Marvell CEO Matt Murphy told investors the firm was seeing “strong tailwinds across each of our data center businesses, including interconnect, switching, and custom” thanks to strong demand for its interconnect and switching products for scale-out application use.

“Connectivity continues to be a critical enabler of AI performance,” Murphy said. “Moving beyond scale-out, we expect this connectivity strength to broaden as hyperscalers build significantly larger AI clusters that increasingly span multiple data centers.”

Murphy claimed Marvell was positioned to address the opportunity at hand through its Colorz 1600 range, as made up of coherent digital signal processor (DSP)-enabled 1.6-terabit ZR and ZR+ DCI modules.

The CEO noted that while customers are initially deploying copper interconnects for scale-up networking, the reach and bandwidth limitations of copper as cluster sizes grow were “increasingly driving customers toward optical interconnects,” as well as purpose-built ultra-accelerator link (UALink), Ethernet for Scale-Up Networking (ESUN), and Nvidia NVLink scale-up switches.

“As a result, we are investing aggressively to lead the industry in next-generation scale-up optical interconnect and switching technologies. On the interconnect side, pluggable modules remain the primary form factor for scale-out networks and we do not expect that to change,” Murphy said, adding that it sees Marvell as an end-to-end partner on the copper-to-optical journey.

“I think why we really win long term is because we convince our customers we can execute on the full end-to-end, which really is what our customers are looking for," Murphy said. "At the end of the day, especially on scale-up, they need to bookend the link and they need to trust that on both sides of it and everything in between they’ve got a partner that can handle that job. Point solutions at this juncture, we believe, are not going to get it done. You really have to have the end-to-end portfolio."

Breaking down the figures, Murphy highlighted overall scale-up optics as a $300 million category for Marvell, including near-packaged optics (NPO) as a major driver for Marvell’s $1.5 billion revenue-guide increase for financial year 2028.

“It’s not just a one-trick pony," Murphy said. "I think that’s the thing I want to stress to you is the CPO (co-packaged optics) is absolutely a key part of it. It will be for next year and certainly the year after. But if I look at the opportunity set that’s happening now at a much faster pace, in parallel with the CPO programs we have, is for NPO.”

Murphy also rejected the idea that AI networking will move neatly from one generation or architecture to the next, noting that hyperscalers are simultaneously deploying multiple architectures.

“It’s a little bit analogous to when people thought, well, there’s 800G DSPs, and then they’re going to move to 1.6T, and it’s all going to just cut over. That’s not how this works anymore," Murphy said. "Our customers have varying architectures that they’re pursuing. … We see this as an 'and,’ not an 'or,’ and I think the magnitude of our scale-up optics opportunity next year is much larger than we thought just a quarter ago.”