Nvidia is investing $3.5 billion in Taiwanese chipmaker MediaTek, and as part of the agreement MediaTek will adopt Nvidia’s NVLink Fusion ecosystem. That access will allow MediaTek to design custom AI chips that can be plugged directly into Nvidia-based data centers.
Context: custom silicon vs. Nvidia GPUs
The deal comes amid a wave of AI companies and major cloud providers — including Amazon, Google, Microsoft, OpenAI and Anthropic — investing in their own chip designs to reduce reliance on Nvidia GPUs. Partnerships like the MediaTek deal enable Nvidia to concede some ground to bespoke silicon while preserving its dominant role as the data-center infrastructure provider.
Dion Harris, Nvidia’s senior director of HPC and AI hyperscaler infrastructure solutions, said on a call with reporters that „Nvidia is an AI infrastructure company. We expanded beyond pure computing chips years ago.”
Technology sharing: NVLink Fusion and interoperability
Under the agreement MediaTek will have access to NVLink Fusion, including NVLink, the communication technology that enables fast data exchange among chips even when those chips are not made by Nvidia. That interoperability is intended to let cloud providers and AI labs deploy their own custom chips alongside Nvidia-based systems using the same rack-scale infrastructure.
Harris said the arrangement allows MediaTek’s customers to “standardize on the rack-scale infrastructure across their AI factories” and deploy custom silicon “right alongside those using the same standard platform.”
Related announcements and business scale
This MediaTek investment follows a related announcement last week in which Nvidia and Amazon Web Services said AWS will deploy an additional 2 million Nvidia GPUs across its infrastructure and integrate NVLink Fusion — though that AWS partnership did not include a direct Nvidia investment.
MediaTek has been building a custom data-center ASIC business. In June the company said it expects that business to generate $2 billion in revenue in 2026 and plans to capture a larger share of the market in coming years.
Broader collaboration areas
Given MediaTek’s experience developing custom chips for smartphones, smart homes, automotive applications and wireless communications, the companies will continue collaborating on developer-focused desktop AI systems such as DGX Spark and Nvidia’s RTX Spark consumer AI PC initiatives.
They will also keep working on platforms for AI-powered, software-defined vehicles. MediaTek’s automotive platforms rely on Nvidia RTX graphics for intelligent vehicle cockpits and integrate with Nvidia Drive AGX for autonomous driving workloads.
Significance and executive remarks
Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang said in a statement that AI is transforming every computing platform and that the partnership will help bring “NVIDIA accelerated computing to new markets” and give customers “the freedom to create differentiated AI systems at enormous scale.”
In short, the investment lets MediaTek expand its custom AI-chip efforts using Nvidia’s proven interconnect and rack-scale ecosystem, while Nvidia secures continued centrality of its infrastructure even as customers and cloud providers develop their own silicon.
