Nvidia is investing $3.5 billion in Taiwanese chip designer MediaTek – turning the company overnight into a serious contender in the multibillion-dollar market for custom AI chips. The stake, described by Bloomberg as Nvidia’s largest direct investment outside the United States, was announced on Monday.
What was actually agreed
Nvidia is buying MediaTek convertible bonds; according to several reports, the GPU giant is taking roughly 90 percent of the issuance. Yet the heart of the deal is less the money than the technology: MediaTek gains access to Nvidia’s NVLink Fusion platform. It lets cloud companies design their own AI accelerators (ASICs) that plug directly into Nvidia-based data centers. The two firms also plan to collaborate on AI PCs (RTX and DGX Spark) and in automotive (Nvidia Drive AGX).
Why MediaTek joins the top tier
MediaTek expects around $2 billion in 2026 revenue from its custom data-center ASIC business and is targeting roughly 15 percent of a market it pegs at about $80 billion by 2027 – ambitious, company-set goals. That puts it head-to-head with Broadcom and Marvell, which together control about 95 percent of the ASIC co-design market according to Bloomberg Intelligence and already supply Google and Amazon. Investors reacted fast: MediaTek shares jumped about 10 percent on Tuesday and are up close to 200 percent year to date.
The bigger picture
For Nvidia, the move is strategic. A growing number of hyperscalers – Amazon, Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, Anthropic – are building their own chips to reduce their dependence on Nvidia’s GPUs. Through NVLink Fusion, Nvidia nonetheless stays the central infrastructure that even rival silicon must dock into – a “tollbooth” model. What remains open is how quickly MediaTek lands concrete large orders: the market-share figures cited are forecasts so far, not signed deals.
Sources: TechCrunch, Bloomberg, CNBC, TrendForce. As of September 2, 2026.
