Nvidia Invests $3.5B in MediaTek to Extend Its AI Chip Ecosystem

Nvidia is putting $3.5 billion into Taiwanese chipmaker MediaTek, a move that will let MediaTek use Nvidia's technology to design custom chips for AI companies and large cloud providers that can plug directly into Nvidia-based data centers.

The investment comes as major cloud players like Amazon, Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, and Anthropic push to build their own chips and reduce reliance on Nvidia's GPUs. By partnering with MediaTek, Nvidia can accommodate that shift toward custom silicon while keeping its position as the backbone of data center infrastructure.

"Nvidia is an AI infrastructure company," said Dion Harris, Nvidia's senior director of HPC and AI hyperscaler infrastructure solutions. "We expanded beyond pure computing chips years ago."

The deal gives MediaTek access to Nvidia's NVLink Fusion ecosystem, including NVLink, which allows different chips to communicate quickly - even those not made by Nvidia. Last week, Nvidia announced a similar partnership with Amazon Web Services, though without a direct investment. AWS will add 2 million Nvidia GPUs to its infrastructure and also adopt NVLink Fusion.

MediaTek will continue building custom chips tailored to cloud firms' workloads, using Nvidia's rack-scale architecture. Harris said the goal is to let MediaTek customers "standardize on the rack-scale infrastructure across their AI factories" and deploy custom chips alongside Nvidia's on the same platform.

MediaTek has been expanding its custom data center ASIC business, expecting $2 billion in revenue from it in 2026. The companies will also keep working together on DGX Spark, Nvidia's desktop AI computer, and extend collaboration to RTX Spark for consumer AI PCs.

In addition, they will develop platforms for AI-powered, software-defined vehicles, with MediaTek's auto systems using Nvidia's RTX graphics and Drive AGX for autonomous driving.

"AI is transforming every computing platform - from the world's largest AI factories to the PC and the car," said Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang. "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."

The expanded partnership signals Nvidia's interest in making its ecosystem work with custom chips, according to a portfolio manager quoted by MarketWatch.

Source: MarketWatch