Marvell offered upbeat projections as it looks years out, but some analysts remain uncertain about whether these can help its stock and earnings in the short term

Marvell Technology Inc. talked up its big ambitions for the next few years at an artificial intelligence event for investors on Tuesday. But some analysts think the company's goals may be too big.

Shares of Marvell $(MRVL)$ were up 7% on Wednesday, but they're still down 32% on the year and significantly lag other prominent AI-chip stocks. Marvell sees a large total addressable market for data-center hardware, but analysts were mixed on whether the company's latest commentary would change the near-term picture for the company or its stock.

At Tuesday's event, the custom chip maker focused on its goal of commanding a 20% share of its total addressable market for data centers in 2028 - only now the pie is larger. Marvell raised its TAM projections to $94 billion from $75 billion at its Custom AI Event, which it hosted in place of its postponed investor day.

Marvell makes custom chips for large technology customers, and its application-specific integrated circuits are an alternative to graphics processing units, like those made by Nvidia Corp. $(NVDA)$.

The company also said it sees a new opportunity within the accelerated custom-compute market for non-processor components used alongside its custom silicon, such as coprocessors and interconnects, which it calls "XPU attach."

In addition to its work with Amazon.com $(AMZN)$, Microsoft Corp. $(MSFT)$, and Alphabet Inc. $(GOOGL)$'s Google, Marvell announced two new "emerging" hyperscaler customers for its XPU sockets and XPU attach sockets, as well as more than 50 custom silicon opportunities with other customers that it said translate to potential lifetime revenue of $75 billion.

Morgan Stanley analysts said that the company "had significant positive commentary about new longer-term opportunities in AI," and that its "numbers almost seem too ambitious," in a note on Wednesday.

"[W]e'd love to see them outperform on near-term revenue rather than increase 2028 targets - but the opportunity is real and the stock should react," the analysts said.

While Cantor Fitzgerald analysts were "encouraged" by the new customers, they said in a Tuesday note that "it is difficult to quantify" the impact it will have on the company's earnings for the foreseeable future.

William Blair analysts said it's unclear how large the new projects are and how strong the customer relationships will be in an increasingly competitive space, but stayed bullish on the company's shares "against a backdrop of a rapidly rising AI tide."

The Cantor analysts also said they "had hoped to hear more" about Marvell's ramp of its custom chips for Amazon and Microsoft, "but little new information was forthcoming," leaving fears of a gap in demand into the middle of next year.

Analysts at Jefferies said in a Tuesday note that Marvell's shares are "still heavily tied" to the company's ramp of Amazon's Trainium2 chips, but that the company's "AI opportunity should widen out into 2027 with [Microsoft] and these new wins."

Melius Research analysts had downgraded Marvell's stock to a hold rating in May on fears that it wouldn't perform as well for the rest of the year and beyond as the other semiconductor and hardware companies covered by the team. The analysts said their previous bullish call had been based on enthusiasm for custom silicon and upside for the company's custom accelerators for Amazon and Microsoft from 2026 to 2028.

Cantor analysts said they "are inherently in the camp that the majority of large-scale custom silicon ramps will be limited" except for those for hyperscale cloud customers focused on consumer-facing large language models. And the transition from training AI models to inferencing, or running the models, "greatly favors the more flexible [graphics processing unit] over custom-silicon," the analysts said.

Without more visibility to its new customer wins and work with its existing hyperscaler customers, the analysts said they "find it difficult underwriting the company's 20% [data-center] market-share target."

Raymond James analysts held a different view in a note on Wednesday. Marvell's attach market contains more of its own intellectual property, the analysts said, which should lead to increasing gross margins. Therefore, the analysts "see further room for upside from even a handful of wins," and believe the company can exceed its target for 20% of the market by 2028.