Nvidia is buying its way deeper into the custom chip market. The company said Monday it will invest $3.5B in convertible bonds issued by Taiwanese chip designer MediaTek as the two expand a partnership that now spans AI data centers, desktop machines, and cars.
Under the deal, MediaTek gains access to Nvidia’s NVLink Fusion ecosystem, a rack-scale blueprint for building custom accelerators that plug into Nvidia-based data centers. Cloud providers and frontier labs can use the arrangement to design their own XPUs while staying inside Nvidia’s networking and scale-out stack. Nvidia frames the move as an answer to Amazon, Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, and Anthropic, all of which are pouring money into in-house silicon to cut reliance on its GPUs.
“We expanded beyond pure computing chips years ago,” Dion Harris, Nvidia’s senior director of hyperscaler infrastructure solutions, told reporters. CEO Jensen Huang called MediaTek “one of the world’s great semiconductor companies” with deep expertise in system-on-chip design.
The partnership has three prongs: custom AI infrastructure built on NVLink Fusion, more generations of the RTX Spark and DGX Spark PC lines that pair Nvidia GPUs with MediaTek silicon, and software-defined vehicle platforms. The investment follows a similar Nvidia-AWS tie-up last week that added 2 million GPUs without the equity component.
