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Last week was the worst stretch for chip stocks in over a year. The Philadelphia Semiconductor index dropped more than 11%, a hot inflation print raised the cost of funding every data center on the drawing board, and the impact of worries about CoreWeave‘s (NASDAQ: CRWV) debt load spread to every company selling into AI infrastructure.
Marvell Technology (NASDAQ: MRVL) sank by nearly 17% in five days. And yet, if your goal is to own one AI chip stock heading into 2027, that decline is the reason why you should look into picking up shares of Marvell now rather than later. Even as investors were selling, the company spent the week revealing its most specific, product-level work of the year, and almost nobody noticed because they were watching the tape.
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What Marvell announced while its stock was falling
Marvell is not a GPU company. It designs chips that sit around GPUs: the custom accelerators that hyperscalers and AI labs are building for their specific workloads, the optical and copper links that connect thousands of processors into clusters, and the memory controllers that keep those chips fed with data. That is the business the company put on display at the Open Compute Project Global Summit in San Jose from Oct. 12 to Oct. 15.
Two announcements from the event stood out to me. On Oct. 12, Marvell unveiled the second generation of its Structera X memory expanders — chips built to attack what the company calls the “memory wall” in AI inference. The problem is simple: As models get bigger and context windows get longer, GPUs run out of memory before they run out of math. Structera X lets a server bolt on up to 6 terabytes of standard DDR5 memory, share it across four hosts, and compress it on the fly, which the company says cuts time to first token by 40% to 50%. The first generation Structera X is already shipping to hyperscalers, and a Meta Platforms (NASDAQ: META) hardware engineering director was quoted in the company’s release. Test models of the second generation will be available in Q1 2027.
Then, on Oct. 13, Marvell followed by unveiling two 3-nanometer connectivity chips, a 3.2-terabit retimer and a new active electrical cable chip that doubles copper reach to more than six meters between AI servers and switches. Both support UALink, the open standard that non-Nvidia accelerators use to talk to each other. Early samples of both are already available for potential customers.
