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

The partnership gives MediaTek access to Nvidia's NVLink Fusion ecosystem, including NVLink, the interconnect technology that allows any chips—even those not made by Nvidia—to communicate with each other at high speed. MediaTek will use this to build custom chips designed by cloud providers or AI labs tailored to their workloads, leveraging Nvidia's "proven scale-up and scale-out technology stack and ecosystem" and "rack-scale architecture."

"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." He explained that every cloud and model builder is deploying Nvidia's platform in some form, and the MediaTek partnership allows their customers to standardize on the same rack-scale infrastructure across their AI factories while deploying custom chips alongside Nvidia systems using the same standard platform.

The investment comes as a growing number of AI companies and major cloud providers, including Amazon, Google, Microsoft, OpenAI and Anthropic, pour resources into developing their own chips to reduce reliance on Nvidia's GPUs. Deals like this one allow Nvidia to cede ground on custom silicon while still keeping its ecosystem at the center of AI data centers. Last week, Nvidia announced a similar partnership with Amazon Web Services, without a direct investment, under which AWS will deploy an additional 2 million Nvidia GPUs and integrate NVLink Fusion.

MediaTek has been building its custom data center ASIC operations and said in June that it expects the business to generate $2 billion in revenue in 2026. The companies will also continue collaborating on DGX Spark, Nvidia's desktop AI computer for developers, extend their collaboration with RTX Spark for consumer AI PCs, and develop platforms for AI-powered, software-defined vehicles using Nvidia's Drive AGX in-car computing platform.

"AI is transforming every computing platform—from the world's largest AI factories to the PC and the car," Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of Nvidia, said in a statement. "Together, we're building platforms that bring NVIDIA accelerated computing to new markets and give customers the freedom to create differentiated AI systems at enormous scale."

The announcement follows Nvidia's latest quarterly results, in which the company beat revenue expectations. In the same period, Nvidia expanded its collaboration with Cisco Systems on rack-scale AI factories, was reported to be acquiring Hugging Face for $12.9 billion, and made another investment in Perplexity, according to analysis by theCUBE.