Marvell Technology Inc. shares surged after Nvidia Corp.'s Jensen Huang predicted the semiconductor and networking company will be the next business to hit a US$1 trillion valuation, more than five times its current market capitalization.
Huang, the chief executive officer of the largest publicly traded company, said Tuesday at the Computex trade show in Taipei alongside Marvell CEO Matt Murphy that Marvell's valuation will soar now that the age of 'useful AI has arrived.' Nvidia has something to gain in saying so: The chip giant took a US$2 billion stake in Marvell three months ago as part of a broader partnership.
Marvell jumped 25 per cent to US$274.58 at 9:45 a.m. in New York, the biggest intraday gain since May 2023. The stock has risen about 222 per cent this year, giving the Santa Clara, California-based company a market value of US$239 billion.
Surging demand for artificial intelligence and the data centres needed to train and run models is boosting the chip industry. The biggest tech companies, such as Amazon.com Inc., Alphabet Inc. and Microsoft Corp., have pledged to spend hundreds of billions of dollars to build data centre capacity and invest in AI. Demand for products like OpenAI's ChatGPT and Anthropic PBC's Claude have created a gold rush to capture market share for the infrastructure supporting the new technology.
Marvell is among several semiconductor companies enjoying gains this week from the renewed euphoria around the AI boom. Memory chipmaker SK Hynix Inc. plans to double memory chip production capacity to ease a supply crunch. STMicroelectronics NV nearly doubled its forecast for revenue from data centres in 2026 and said sales could double again next year. Chip designer Arm Holdings PLC expects to hit a target of US$15 billion in sales for semiconductors earlier than anticipated because of demand from the AI boom, according to CEO Rene Haas.
Nvidia has ridden the AI wave better than any other company, becoming the primary supplier of the GPU chips used for AI. Its shares have gained more than 1,400 per cent since 2023, valuing the company at US$5.5 trillion.
About 15 companies had market values exceeding US$1 trillion as of Monday, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. All of them, with the exception of Saudi Arabian Oil Co., drugmaker Eli Lilly & Co. and Berkshire Hathaway Inc., are tech companies.
