Nvidia Invests $3.5 Billion in MediaTek: What Is Jensen Huang Eyeing?

MediaTek is one of the world's largest fabless chip design companies, with its traditional strengths mainly concentrated in smartphones, smart TVs, tablets, and wireless connectivity chips. The company provides chips for over 2 billion connected devices annually and is expanding its business into AI PCs, high-performance computing, automotive, and AI data centers.

One of MediaTek's key competitive advantages is its System-on-Chip (SoC) design and low-power capabilities. In the past, the company mainly applied these capabilities to consumer electronics such as smartphones. However, as demand for AI computing power grows, MediaTek has begun extending its chip design capabilities into the custom ASIC/XPU market for data centers.

In fact, this is not the first collaboration between MediaTek and Nvidia. The two companies have previously co-designed the GB10 Grace Blackwell Superchip and partnered in the field of automotive chips. This $3.5 billion investment represents a further upgrade of their relationship from product cooperation to capital and long-term technical partnership.

The primary reason Nvidia chose to invest in MediaTek is custom AI chips.

As AI data center scales continue to expand, major tech companies are increasingly leaning toward developing their own ASICs or XPUs for specific AI workloads. Compared with general-purpose GPUs, custom chips can optimize performance, power consumption, and cost for specific tasks, meaning future AI data centers are unlikely to rely on Nvidia GPUs as their sole computing architecture.

This year, Nvidia launched NVLink Fusion, allowing third-party CPUs and custom AI chips to connect to Nvidia's NVLink interconnect architecture. MediaTek is among the first chip design companies to join this ecosystem, collaborating with vendors such as Marvell to develop custom chips that support NVLink Fusion.

This partnership further clarifies that MediaTek will help hyperscalers, cloud computing enterprises, and AI model developers design custom XPUs while enabling these chips to connect to Nvidia's NVLink rack-scale AI systems. The two companies will also continue developing RTX Spark and DGX Spark PC chips as well as AI automotive platforms.

Nvidia weekly stock price chart, Source: TradingView

From a stock price perspective, the $3.5 billion investment in MediaTek is a long-term strategic positive, but its short-term earnings contribution is limited.

On the positive side, the deal strengthens Nvidia's ability to address competition in custom AI chips. The market was previously concerned that big tech companies developing ASICs could erode Nvidia's GPU share, while NVLink Fusion provides another growth pathway—even if the ASIC market expands, Nvidia can still participate through interconnects, networking, and AI systems.

Meanwhile, the structure of convertible bonds also means that if MediaTek's AI data center business grows rapidly in the future and the company's valuation increases, Nvidia could also reap potential equity investment returns.

However, this deal is also controversial. Nvidia has continuously expanded its AI ecosystem through investments and financial support in recent years. Reuters pointed out that this model has drawn market attention to 'circular financing' in the AI industry, where Nvidia provides funds to ecosystem partners who simultaneously participate in building AI infrastructure based on Nvidia technology.

Therefore, the $3.5 billion investment itself is not enough to act as an independent catalyst for a significant rally in NVDA's stock price. What truly determines the long-term value of this deal is whether MediaTek can secure custom AI chip orders from major cloud providers.

This content was translated using AI and reviewed for clarity. It is for informational purposes only.