Mizrahi said Marvell has followed the same strategy for about a decade, but only now has the market reached the bottleneck it was built to address. “The first and more famous AI bottleneck was compute, but quickly connectivity became the bigger bottleneck,” he said in an interview with Calcalist. He argued that when AI systems split tasks across hundreds of thousands of processors, performance depends on connecting them quickly and efficiently so they function as one computing unit.
He compared Marvell’s role to Mellanox, which Nvidia bought for $7 billion, and said Marvell has built a broad connectivity portfolio, including solutions for traditional copper lines and a full optical lineup. Copper remains cheaper and widely deployed in data centers, he said, but physical limits are pushing the industry toward optical communications inside server farms. Marvell also develops custom chips for clients, including products that help customer chips connect directly into Nvidia’s ecosystem. “In some places we work with Nvidia, and in others we compete,” Mizrahi said.
The company’s Israeli roots go back to major acquisitions, starting with Galileo in October 2000 for $2.7 billion, then DSPC from Intel in 2006 for $600 million, and Radan from Rad Binet in 2007 for about $50 million. Those deals built Marvell’s Israeli development center, which now has about 500 employees in Petah Tikva and Yokneam, out of roughly 8,000 worldwide. Mizrahi himself joined after studying electrical and computer engineering at Technion, and later became the senior Israeli executive at Marvell, reporting directly to CEO Matt Murphy since 2020.
He said Murphy transformed Marvell after activist investor Starboard ousted the founders in 2016, when the stock had stalled around a $10 billion valuation. Major purchases included Cavium for $6 billion in 2018, Inphi for $8 billion in 2021, and Celestial for $3.25 billion last December to deepen the company’s photonics push. Marvell has since shifted from consumer chips to data center and cloud infrastructure, and Mizrahi said it is now seen as a front-line technology company. Financially, however, it still trails rivals: revenue rose 42% in 2025 to $8.2 billion, with expectations of $11.5 billion this year and $30 billion by 2030, while gross margin stands at 51%. To justify a trillion-dollar valuation at Nvidia- or Broadcom-like multiples, Marvell would need revenue to grow roughly sixfold.
