Nvidia is investing $3.5 billion in Taiwanese chipmaker MediaTek, a strategic move that will see MediaTek adopt Nvidia's technology to design custom chips for AI companies and hyperscalers. These chips can be integrated directly into Nvidia-based data centers, allowing Nvidia to maintain its dominance in AI infrastructure while accommodating the growing demand for customized silicon.
The investment comes as AI firms and major cloud providers—including Amazon, Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, and Anthropic—invest heavily in developing their own chips to reduce reliance on Nvidia's GPUs. By partnering with MediaTek, Nvidia can cede ground in the custom silicon space while preserving its lead as the foundational architecture for data centers.
"Nvidia is an AI infrastructure company," said Dion Harris, Nvidia's senior director of HPC and AI hyperscaler infrastructure solutions, during a press call on Monday. "We expanded beyond pure computing chips years ago."
The partnership highlights the circular nature of Nvidia's recent financing efforts, which often involve investing in companies that ultimately feed back into its ecosystem. This deal grants MediaTek access to Nvidia's NVLink Fusion ecosystem, including NVLink—a technology that enables fast communication between any chips, regardless of manufacturer. This interoperability is key to Nvidia's strategy of making its platform the standard for AI computing.
Last week, Nvidia announced a similar partnership with Amazon Web Services, though without a direct investment. AWS will deploy an additional 2 million Nvidia GPUs across its infrastructure and integrate NVLink Fusion, further cementing Nvidia's position in the cloud market.
With Nvidia's backing, MediaTek can continue to build custom chips for cloud companies and AI labs, tailored to specific workloads, while leveraging Nvidia's "proven scale-up and scale-out technology stack and ecosystem" and its "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." He added, "This is really about opening up this ecosystem to the entire MediaTek customer base."
MediaTek has not publicly detailed its customer base for custom AI chips, but it's clear Nvidia aims to help the company expand this business, as long as Nvidia can benefit from the growth. MediaTek has been steadily building its custom data center ASIC (application-specific integrated circuit) operations, and in June 2026, it projected that this business would generate $2 billion in revenue for the year, with ambitions to capture more market share in the coming years.
Beyond data centers, MediaTek's expertise in developing custom chips for smartphones, smart homes, automobiles, and wireless communications means the collaboration will extend to Nvidia's DGX Spark—a compact, developer-focused desktop AI computer. The two companies have also expanded their partnership to include RTX Spark, Nvidia's initiative to bring AI technology into consumer AI PCs.
via TechCrunch AI