Nvidia bets $3.5B on MediaTek to keep custom chips inside its ecosystem

Nvidia is investing $3.5 billion in MediaTek and, as part of the deal, giving the Taiwanese chipmaker access to its NVLink Fusion ecosystem. That access lets MediaTek design custom AI chips that connect to Nvidia-based data centers. The move answers an awkward problem for Nvidia: its biggest customers, including Amazon, Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, and Anthropic, are all building their own silicon to cut their dependence on Nvidia GPUs.

Nvidia's response is to make the custom chips plug into its fabric rather than route around it. If a company's in-house accelerator talks to the rest of the system over NVLink, Nvidia stays at the center of the data center even when it is not selling every chip. Dion Harris, a senior director at Nvidia, put the framing plainly: "Nvidia is an AI infrastructure company. We expanded beyond pure computing chips years ago."

The numbers give a sense of the stakes. MediaTek expects its custom data center ASIC business to bring in $2 billion in revenue in 2026, and separately AWS said it will deploy another 2 million Nvidia GPUs. The two companies also plan to work together on AI in vehicles and on consumer AI PCs through the DGX Spark and RTX Spark lines.

Why it matters

If you plan compute or watch the chip market, this shows how Nvidia intends to hold its position as custom silicon spreads: not by fighting it head-on, but by making it interoperate through NVLink. The question to track is whether hyperscalers accept that tie or keep pushing toward stacks they fully control.