Nvidia puts $3.5B into MediaTek: a plan to stay essential as Big Tech builds its own chips
Nvidia took roughly 90 percent of MediaTek's record $3.9 billion convertible bond offering. Under the deal MediaTek adopts NVLink Fusion, which plugs custom accelerators into Nvidia's rack-scale systems.
Nvidia announced a $3.5 billion investment in Taiwanese chipmaker MediaTek through convertible bonds. The sum accounts for roughly 90 percent of MediaTek's $3.9 billion overseas convertible bond offering, the largest of its kind in the history of Taiwan's capital market. Alphabet also participated in the offering, though its share was not disclosed.
The technical backbone of the partnership: MediaTek adopts Nvidia's NVLink Fusion platform, which lets cloud providers and model developers build their own custom accelerator chips and connect them into Nvidia's rack-scale data center systems. The collaboration also expands to RTX Spark and DGX Spark chips for consumer and enterprise PCs, and to AI automotive platforms built around MediaTek's Dimensity Auto line.
The strategy reads clearly: as Big Tech starts making its own AI silicon, Nvidia chooses to be the backbone those chips plug into rather than be cut out of the equation. MediaTek is growing fast on that side too; in June the company said its custom data center ASIC business should generate $2 billion in revenue in 2026.
The shape of the investment also drew debate: a company that sells accelerators putting capital into the ecosystem around those accelerators reignited the argument about circular financing in AI. Nvidia's stock slipped after the announcement.
