#AsteraLabs领涨芯片股 Astera Labs surges 16.39%！Hits new highs！UBS: Upward revisions to the CXL market and forecasts for MRVL and ALAB!

UBS believes the CXL opportunity is evolving from single-CPU memory expanders to XPU attach, rack-wide coherent fabric, and even multi-rack fabric. After Agentic AI drives growth in the number of CPU and XPU devices, both the CXL attach rate and the value per single processor have room to rise. By 2030, the CXL market is expected to approach $7–10 billion, with the value of high-speed I/O and coherent interconnects being revised upward again.
On June 29, a team of UBS (UBS) analysts led by Timothy Arcuri released a research report, significantly raising financial forecasts and target prices for Marvell Technology (MRVL) and Astera Labs (ALAB). The core logic is that the CXL (Compute Express Link) technology market is entering an “inflection point.”
UBS believes that, as a cache-coherent, low-latency, high-bandwidth interconnect technology built on PCIe, CXL is gradually becoming a key enabling technology for data centers, and the market space is continuing to expand.
UBS analyst Arcuri further noted that the ultimate TAM of the CXL market still remains uncertain, mainly due to differences in attach rates and solution configurations (including different deployment methods for expanders and switches). However, he believes that the CXL attach value for each XPU/CPU will continue to rise from the current approximate $100–200 to higher multiples. By 2030, total shipments of XPUs, head-node CPUs, and standalone CPUs are expected to reach approximately 73 million units.
It is worth noting that UBS’s stance on ratings for the two companies is starkly different—MRVL receives a “Buy,” while ALAB receives only a “Neutral,” even though ALAB’s target price increase (+95%) is far greater than MRVL’s (+48%). This discrepancy is key to understanding UBS’s core logic.
Breakdown of Astera Labs (ALAB)
1. Current business scale is still small: Astera Labs’ Leo CXL extender (CXL Extender) product currently generates annual revenue of approximately $25 million, and Microsoft (MSFT) is an important customer.
2. Growth catalysts
UBS expects two catalysts to drive ALAB’s CXL business growth:
Increased Microsoft procurement: New customer onboarding is expected to enter a volume ramp phase in the second half of 2026; in 2027, it will benefit from the realization of design orders from a new U.S. ultra-large-scale cloud service provider.
Why “Neutral”? Although ALAB’s EPS forecast increase (2028: +49.8%) is even greater than MRVL’s (+11.9%), UBS still maintains a “Neutral” rating.
This reflects:
Scale gap: ALAB’s 2028 revenue forecast of $3.3 billion is only one-seventh of MRVL’s $23.9 billion.
Competitive landscape: UBS explicitly points out that Marvell currently holds a leading market share in the CXL product space, but as the market expands, Astera Labs and Broadcom will become more important players—meaning ALAB’s market position is that of a “follower,” not a “leader.”
Valuation is already high: ALAB’s stock price has risen more than 142% year-to-date; the current share price is about $391.74. A target price of $400 implies only about 2% upside, reflecting UBS’s view that the current valuation has already been largely priced in.