Nvidia bets $3.5 billion on MediaTek to stay at the heart of AI infrastructure

Nvidia has announced a $3.5 billion investment in the Taiwanese chipmaker MediaTek. Under the terms of the deal, MediaTek will gain Nvidia technology for developing custom silicon that customers will be able to plug directly into data centers built on Nvidia's solutions.

The agreement reflects how Nvidia intends to remain indispensable in the face of a trend it finds worrying. A growing number of AI companies and major cloud providers — Amazon, Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, Anthropic — are investing in their own chips to reduce their dependence on Nvidia's GPUs. The partnership with MediaTek lets the company cede part of the market to custom silicon while still remaining the foundation on which the entire data-center structure rests.

“Nvidia is an AI infrastructure company,” Dion Harris, senior director for HPC and hyperscaler solutions, told reporters. “We moved beyond pure compute chips many years ago.”

A closed loop of investment

The deal underscores the circular nature of Nvidia's financial maneuvering in recent years: the company invests in players whose money then flows back into its own ecosystem. MediaTek will gain access to NVLink Fusion, including the NVLink technology that lets any chips — even ones not made by Nvidia — exchange data with one another at high speed.

A week earlier, Nvidia announced a similar partnership with Amazon Web Services, though this time without a direct investment: AWS will deploy an additional two million Nvidia GPUs and adopt NVLink Fusion. According to Harris, virtually every cloud and every model developer is deploying Nvidia's platform in one form or another, and MediaTek will now be able to offer its customers the ability to standardize rack-level infrastructure and place their own chips alongside Nvidia's solutions.

From smartphones to cars

MediaTek has not disclosed details about the customers for its custom AI chips, but it is steadily building out its line of specialized data-center ASICs: in June, the company said it expects to generate $2 billion in revenue from the business in 2026.

Drawing on MediaTek's experience with chips for smartphones, smart homes, cars and wireless communications, the two sides will continue their collaboration in the consumer segment as well — on the DGX Spark mini-computer and its RTX Spark variant for AI PCs — as well as on platforms for “software-defined” cars that use RTX graphics and Nvidia's Drive AGX platform.

“AI is transforming every computing platform — from the largest AI factories to the PC and the car,” said Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang.

Source: TechCrunch