The Next Trillion-Dollar AI Trade Just Hit the S&P 500

Jensen Huang just made a huge prediction…

The CEO of Nvidia — the most important figure in AI hardware on the planet — publicly called Marvell Technology (NASDAQ: MRVL) “the next trillion-dollar company.”

Now, Wall Street is backing him up.

Indeed, Marvell shares were added to the S&P 500 index yesterday, replacing Pool Corporation.

The move follows a 7.27% jump last Thursday that pushed the stock to $310.58, capping a roughly 210% rally year to date.

The company’s Q1 fiscal 2027 revenue hit a record $2.418 billion, up 28% year over year, with 76% of that coming from data center customers.

KeyBanc just lifted its price target on the stock to $385 from $260.

By any conventional measure, Marvell is one of the best-performing major tech stocks of 2026.

And the inclusion into the S&P 500 will trigger another wave of institutional buying from index funds over the next few sessions.

And what’s more is that Huang’s “trillion-dollar” call is the kind of validation that almost never comes from a competing semiconductor CEO.

Of course, the real reason to pay attention has very little to do with Huang or Marvell itself.

It has to do with a technological revolution that is going to take the AI boom to an entirely new level…

Last Wednesday, Marvell announced it had shipped more than 5 million coherent photonic integrated circuits to customers around the world, in partnership with Israel’s Tower Semiconductor.

These aren’t ordinary chips.

They use light — not electricity — to move data between AI processors at speeds copper cables physically cannot match. They are silicon photonics, and they are the single most important technology in the AI buildout that almost nobody is talking about.

That means Marvell’s S&P 500 inclusion isn’t just a Wall Street stamp of approval on Marvell…

It’s a Wall Street stamp of approval on the entire photonics trade.

What Marvell Doesn’t Make

The key thing to note here is that Marvell does not actually manufacture the photonic chips it sells.

It designs them and partners with foundries — Tower Semiconductor on the silicon photonics side, TSMC and GlobalFoundries on the integration side — to produce them at industrial scale.

That partnership model is what has allowed Marvell to ship 5 million coherent photonic ICs in a market where demand still outstrips supply.

But every photonic chip that flows through those foundries requires specialized materials and intellectual property that almost nobody in the industry possesses.

The proprietary electro-optic modulator technology… the high-speed signal conversion components… the rare-earth-free materials that integrate directly into existing foundry processes…

Marvell doesn’t make these things. Tower doesn’t either.

Instead, they are licensed and supplied by a tiny handful of specialty companies whose technology gets embedded into every photonic chip the industry ships.

And that’s where the real upside lives.

Marvell is now valued at roughly $270 billion. Tower Semiconductor has rallied substantially in 2026. Lumentum and Coherent — the legacy optical component makers — have both run dramatically higher from their 2025 lows.

The hyperscalers are committed to spending over $600 billion on data center capex this year alone, and a rapidly growing share of that spending is flowing into photonic interconnects.

However, the companies that license the underlying technology that makes all of this possible haven’t yet been re-rated to match.

They are still trading at a fraction of where they should be once the rest of the market catches up to what Marvell, Nvidia, TSMC, and the broader photonics push have already proven.

That’s exactly why I put together my latest report on the single best photonics stock for your portfolio.

It details a small American company holding the proprietary technology that I believe will become the industry standard for the high-speed light-based components going into AI chips.

The technology is rare-earth-free, made in the United States, and built to integrate directly into the foundry processes that Tower, TSMC, and GlobalFoundries already use.

Right now the company is generating just six figures in annual revenue. But every photonic chip Marvell ships needs technology like this to function.

Even a small slice of the market Marvell is now leading would translate into a transformative outcome for a company this size.

The position is already up triple digits since I first recommended it. But after today’s S&P 500 inclusion formally validates the entire photonics trade, the catch-up move in the underlying IP layer is just getting started.

You can get the full details right here.

Wall Street just made photonics official.

The investors who get positioned in the right corner of the value chain are the ones who’ll get paid as the trillion-dollar trade Huang just called out plays out across the rest of the decade.