Nvidia Invests $3.5B in MediaTek to Boost Custom Chip Business
Nvidia has invested $3.5 billion in Taiwanese chipmaker MediaTek as part of a deal to help it design custom chips for AI companies and hyperscalers that can be plugged directly into Nvidia-based data centers.
This move comes as AI companies like Amazon, Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, and Anthropic invest heavily in building their own chips to reduce reliance on Nvidia's GPUs. The partnership with MediaTek allows Nvidia to maintain its lead as the dominant data center scaffolding while ceding ground to custom silicon.
Nvidia sees itself as an 'AI infrastructure company' that has expanded beyond pure computing chips, according to Dion Harris, Nvidia's senior director of HPC and AI hyperscaler infrastructure solutions. The deal gives MediaTek access to Nvidia's NVLink Fusion ecosystem, including NVLink technology for quick communication between chips.
The partnership also involves MediaTek continuing to build custom chips designed by cloud companies or AI labs tailored to their workloads using Nvidia's proven scale-up and scale-out technology stack and ecosystem. This will enable customers to standardize on rack-scale infrastructure across their AI factories, deploying custom chips right alongside those using the same platform.