Nvidia has agreed to a $3.5 billion investment in MediaTek. The deal requires the Taiwanese chipmaker to adopt Nvidia’s technology stack, enabling it to design custom silicon for AI firms and hyperscalers that plugs directly into Nvidia-based data centers.
Why Nvidia is doing this
Major cloud providers including Amazon, Google, Microsoft, OpenAI and Anthropic are increasingly building their own chips to reduce reliance on Nvidia GPUs. This agreement allows Nvidia to concede ground to custom silicon while maintaining its lead as the dominant provider of data center infrastructure.
“Nvidia is an AI infrastructure company,” Dion Harris, senior director of HPC and AI hyperscaler infrastructure solutions at Nvidia, said on Monday during a call with reporters. “We expanded beyond pure computing chips years ago.”
The partnership highlights the circular nature of Nvidia’s recent financing efforts, where the chip giant invests in companies that feed back into its own ecosystem. The deal grants MediaTek access to the NVLink Fusion ecosystem. This includes NVLink, the technology that allows any chips, even those not made by Nvidia, to communicate with one another at high speed.
Last week, Nvidia announced a similar partnership with Amazon Web Services without a direct investment. AWS will deploy an additional 2 million Nvidia GPUs across its infrastructure and integrate NVLink Fusion.
Through this partnership, MediaTek can build custom chips designed by cloud companies or AI labs for their specific workloads. These chips will utilise 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 has not publicly shared details regarding its customer base for custom AI chips. It is clear Nvidia aims to help boost this segment of the business provided MediaTek participates in the wider ecosystem. MediaTek has been gradually building its custom data center ASIC operations. In June, the company stated it expects this business to generate $2 billion in revenue in 2026 and hopes to capture more market share in coming years.
Other areas of collaboration
Given MediaTek’s expertise in developing custom chips for smartphones, smart homes, automobiles and wireless communications, the two companies will continue to collaborate on DGX Spark. This is Nvidia’s small, developer-focused desktop AI computer. They have also extended their work on RTX Spark, Nvidia’s initiative to bring its AI technology into consumer AI PCs.
MediaTek and Nvidia will also continue “developing platforms for AI-powered, software-defined vehicles in the era of physical AI,” according to a press release. MediaTek’s automotive 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.
“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.”
