Wall Street Is Bullish on 1 of These Chip Stocks and Bearish on the Other
Micah Zimmerman, The Motley Fool
Sun, July 12, 2026 at 10:48 PM GMT+5:30
4 min read
Both Marvell Technology and Intel make chips that matter to the artificial intelligence build-out, and both have plenty of fans on the internet
What’s interesting to me is that the biggest names on Wall Street, the research desks at firms like Goldman Sachs,Bank of America (NYSE: BAC), and Morgan Stanley (NYSE: MS), have landed on opposite sides
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One of these stocks has the big banks leaning in. The other has them holding back, politely but clearly. So who’s right?
Why the big banks are bullish on Marvell Technology
Marvell Technology (NASDAQ: MRVL) has quietly become one of Wall Street’s favorite ways to play AI without owning the obvious names. Its business is twofold, and both halves are working. The first is custom silicon. When a giant cloud company decides it wants to design its own AI chip rather than buy one off the shelf, it needs a partner to actually turn that design into working hardware, and Marvell has become that partner for several of them
The second is optical interconnect, the unglamorous “plumbing” that shuttles data between the thousands of chips packed into an AI data center. Marvell now expects to supply that connective tissue to all five of the largest U.S. cloud operators
Goldman Sachs recently raised its price target on the stock, citing improving visibility into the custom-silicon pipeline, and Bank of America has been constructive as well. The reason the banks like the setup, as I read it, is that these two businesses reinforce each other. A customer that uses Marvell’s building blocks inside its custom chip tends to buy Marvell’s interconnect products too, which makes the relationship stickier and harder for a rival to pry loose
Marvell’s addition to the S&P 500 in June only underlined how far it has traveled from a sleepy niche supplier
Why Wall Street is more skeptical of Intel
Intel (NASDAQ: INTC), by contrast, is a turnaround story that the big banks are watching with arms folded. The company is trying to do two hard things at once: fix its own product lineup and reinvent itself as a foundry, meaning a contract manufacturer that builds chips for other companies the way Taiwan’s giants do
There’s been real operational progress here worth acknowledging — Intel’s next-generation 18A-P manufacturing process entered risk production this summer on the timeline it promised, and the company says it has resolved the yield problems that dogged the earlier version
