Nvidia’s $3.5B MediaTek bet reveals its plan for tackling Big Tech’s AI chip buildout
techcrunch ·
Nvidia is investing $3.5 billion in Taiwanese chipmaker MediaTek, which will adopt Nvidia's NVLink Fusion technology to design custom chips for AI companies and hyperscalers that can integrate into Nvidia-based data centers. The deal comes as AI firms and major cloud providers such as Amazon, Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, and Anthropic develop their own chips to reduce reliance on Nvidia GPUs. Nvidia frames itself as an AI infrastructure company, aiming to maintain its dominant data center ecosystem while allowing custom silicon to coexist. The partnership also extends to consumer AI PCs through DGX Spark and RTX Spark, as well as AI-powered software-defined vehicles. MediaTek has been growing its custom data center ASIC business, projecting $2 billion in revenue from it in 2026. By opening up its ecosystem, Nvidia hopes to standardize rack-scale infrastructure across its customers' AI factories while enabling deployment of custom chips alongside its own.
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