Nvidia’s $3.5B MediaTek Bet Reveals Its Plan for Tackling Big Tech’s AI Chip Buildout
Nvidia is investing $3.5 billion into Taiwanese chipmaker MediaTek. As part of the deal, MediaTek will adopt Nvidia’s technology that will help it design custom chips for AI companies and hyperscalers that can be plugged directly into Nvidia-based data centers.
The Strategy Behind the Deal
The deal comes as a growing number of AI companies and major cloud providers like Amazon, Google, Microsoft, OpenAI and Anthropic invest in building their own chips so they can be less reliant on Nvidia’s GPUs. Deals like this one with MediaTek allow Nvidia to cede ground to custom silicon while still maintaining its lead as the dominant data center scaffolding.
“Nvidia is an AI infrastructure company,” Dion Harris, Nvidia’s senior director of HPC and AI hyperscaler infrastructure solutions, said on Monday on a call with reporters. “We expanded beyond pure computing chips years ago.”
The Circular Nature of Nvidia’s Investments
The partnership underscores the circular nature of Nvidia’s financing efforts over the past few years, which have often seen the chip giant investing in companies that flow back into its own ecosystem. The deal will give MediaTek access to Nvidia’s NVLink Fusion ecosystem, including NVLink, the technology that lets any chips, even if they’re not Nvidia’s chips, communicate with each other quickly.
Last week, Nvidia announced a similar partnership with Amazon Web Services, albeit without the direct investment. AWS will deploy an additional 2 million Nvidia GPUs across its infrastructure, and also integrate NVLink Fusion.
What This Means for MediaTek and Its Customers
With the Nvidia partnership, MediaTek can continue to build custom chips designed by cloud companies or AI labs tailored to their workloads, leveraging Nvidia’s “proven scale-up and scale-out technology stack and ecosystem” and “rack-scale architecture.”
“Basically, every cloud, every model builder is deploying our platform in some shape, form, or fashion,” Harris said. “So by MediaTek being able to offer this extension to its customers, it allows them to standardize on the rack-scale infrastructure across their AI factories… and also deploy their [custom chips] right alongside those using the same standard platform.”
“This is really about opening up this ecosystem to the entire MediaTek customer base,” Harris continued.
MediaTek’s Growing Custom Chip Business
MediaTek hasn’t publicly shared information about its customer base as it relates to custom AI chips, but it’s clear Nvidia aims to help it boost that side of the business so long as it can come along for the ride. MediaTek has been slowly building its custom data center ASIC (application-specific integrated circuit) operations, saying in June that it expects the business to generate $2 billion in revenue in 2026, and hopes to target more of the market in the coming years.
Expanding Collaboration Beyond Data Centers
Given MediaTek’s expertise in developing custom chips that power smartphones, smart homes, automobiles, and wireless communications, the company will also continue to collaborate with Nvidia on DGX Spark, the company’s small developer-focused desktop AI computer. The companies have extended their collaboration with the RTX Spark, Nvidia’s push to put its AI tech into consumer AI PCs.
MediaTek and Nvidia will also continue “developing platforms for AI-powered, software-defined vehicles in the era of physical AI,” per a press release. MediaTek’s auto platforms rely on Nvidia’s RTX graphics for intelligent vehicle cockpits and work alongside Nvidia Drive AGX, the company’s in-car computing platform for autonomous driving workloads.
Jensen Huang’s Vision
“AI is transforming every computing platform from the world’s largest AI factories to the PC and the car,” Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of Nvidia, said in a statement. “Together, we’re building platforms that bring NVIDIA accelerated computing to new markets and give customers the freedom to create differentiated AI systems at enormous scale.”
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