Nvidia invests $3.5B in MediaTek to expand its custom-chip ecosystem

Nvidia is investing $3.5 billion in Taiwanese chipmaker MediaTek. As part of the deal, MediaTek will adopt Nvidia technology that helps it design custom chips for AI companies and hyperscalers that can be plugged directly into Nvidia-based data centers.

The deal 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 reliance on Nvidia’s GPUs. Deals like this one let Nvidia cede ground to custom silicon while maintaining its lead as the dominant data-center scaffolding. “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. “We expanded beyond pure computing chips years ago.”

The partnership gives MediaTek access to Nvidia’s NVLink Fusion ecosystem, including NVLink, the technology that lets chips — even non-Nvidia ones — communicate with each other quickly. Harris said essentially every cloud provider and AI model builder already deploys Nvidia’s platform in some form, and that extending that ecosystem to MediaTek’s own customers lets them standardize on the same rack-scale infrastructure across their AI data centers while deploying their own custom chips alongside it. 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.

MediaTek hasn’t disclosed its custom-chip customer base, but it said in June that it expects its data-center ASIC business to generate $2 billion in revenue in 2026, with plans to grow further. Beyond data centers, MediaTek and Nvidia will keep collaborating on DGX Spark, Nvidia’s small developer-focused desktop AI computer, and its consumer-facing RTX Spark extension for AI PCs. The companies will also continue developing platforms for AI-powered, software-defined vehicles — MediaTek’s auto platforms use Nvidia RTX graphics for vehicle cockpits and work alongside Nvidia Drive AGX for autonomous-driving workloads.

Why it matters

The MediaTek deal shows Nvidia hedging against the custom-silicon trend among its biggest customers by making its own networking technology the standard those custom chips plug into, rather than trying to stop the shift outright.