Nvidia is investing $3.5 billion in Taiwanese chipmaker MediaTek. As part of the partnership, MediaTek will adopt Nvidia’s technology to help design custom chips for AI companies and hyperscalers that can connect directly to Nvidia-based data centers.
The partnership comes as a growing number of AI companies and major cloud providers, including Amazon, Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, and Anthropic, invest in building their own chips to reduce their dependence on Nvidia’s GPUs. Deals like this one with MediaTek allow Nvidia to cede ground to custom silicon while maintaining its lead as a dominant data center foothold.
“Nvidia is an AI infrastructure company,” Dion Harris, Nvidia’s senior director of HPC and AI hyperscaler infrastructure solutions, said on a call with reporters Monday. “We expanded beyond pure computing chips many years ago.”
The partnership highlights the cyclical nature of Nvidia’s fundraising efforts over the past few years, when the semiconductor giant often invested in companies that fed back into its ecosystem. The deal gives MediaTek access to Nvidia’s NVLink Fusion ecosystem, which includes NVLink. NVLink is a technology that allows any chip, even non-Nvidia chips, to quickly communicate with each other.
Last week, Nvidia announced a similar partnership with Amazon Web Services, although there was no direct investment. AWS will deploy an additional 2 million Nvidia GPUs across its infrastructure and also integrate NVLink Fusion.
The partnership with Nvidia allows MediaTek to leverage Nvidia’s “proven scale-up and scale-out technology stack and ecosystem” and “rack-scale architecture” to continue building custom chips designed for the workloads of cloud companies and AI labs.
“Essentially every cloud, every model builder is deploying our platform in some shape, form or fashion,” Harris said. “So, MediaTek’s ability to offer this enhancement to our customers allows them to standardize rack-scale infrastructure across their AI factories and even deploy (custom chips) in parallel with those using the same standard platform.”
“This is really about opening up this ecosystem to MediaTek’s entire customer base,” Harris continued.
MediaTek hasn’t publicly shared information about its customer base related to its custom AI chips, but it’s clear that Nvidia is looking to help strengthen that side of the business, as long as it can participate in it. MediaTek has been gradually building out its custom data center ASIC (application-specific integrated circuit) business, and in June said it expects the business to generate $2 billion in revenue in 2026 and wants to target more markets in the coming years.
MediaTek will also continue to work with Nvidia on DGX Spark, the company’s small desktop AI computer for developers, given its expertise in developing custom chips that power smartphones, smart homes, cars, and wireless communications. The companies have expanded their collaboration with RTX Spark, Nvidia’s effort to bring AI technology to consumer AI PCs.
MediaTek and Nvidia also plan to continue “developing a platform for AI-powered, software-defined vehicles in the era of physical AI,” according to a press release. MediaTek’s automotive platform leverages Nvidia’s RTX graphics for intelligent vehicle cockpits and operations, alongside Nvidia Drive AGX, the company’s in-vehicle computing platform for self-driving workloads.
“AI is transforming every computing platform, from the world’s largest AI factory to PCs and cars,” Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang said in a statement. “Together, we are building a platform that brings NVIDIA-accelerated computing to new markets and gives customers the freedom to create differentiated AI systems at scale.”
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