Nvidia’s $3.5B MediaTek bet reveals its plan for tackling Big Tech’s AI chip buildout

Nvidia is investing $3.5 billion into Taiwanese chipmaker MediaTek. As part of the deal, MediaTek will adopt Nvidia’s technology that will help 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 like Amazon, Google, Microsoft, OpenAI and Anthropic invest in building their own chips so they can be less reliant on Nvidia’s GPUs. Deals like this one with MediaTek allow Nvidia to cede ground to custom silicon while still 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 Monday on a call with reporters. “We expanded beyond pure computing chips years ago.”

The partnership underscores the circular nature of Nvidia’s financing efforts over the past few years, which have often seen the chip giant investing in companies that flow back into its own ecosystem. The deal will give MediaTek access to Nvidia’s NVLink Fusion ecosystem, including NVLink, the technology that lets any chips — even if they’re not Nvidia’s chips — communicate with each other quickly.