NVIDIA’s $3.5B MediaTek Deal Supercharges NVLink Fusion For Custom AI Chips

NVIDIA is doubling down on its partnership with MediaTek, committing $3.5 billion to purchase convertible bonds issued by the Taiwanese chip design firm. Announced on Monday, the deal deepens the two companies' collaboration across three major areas, including AI infrastructure, local AI computing, and software-defined automotive platforms.

A huge part of this partnership revolves around custom AI hardware. MediaTek is adopting NVIDIA’s NVLink Fusion platform (just as SiFive is doing), positioning itself as a key design partner for cloud service providers, frontier model developers, and hyperscalers looking to build custom AI accelerators, often referred to as XPUs.

By building custom silicon on top of NVLink Fusion, MediaTek's customers can integrate specialized processing dies directly into NVIDIA’s rack-scale MGX architectures. In doing so, MediaTek can pitch to its clients several benefits, including lower development complexity, better performance, and accelerated timelines to market.

"AI is transforming every computing platform—from the world’s largest AI factories to the PC and the car," said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA. "MediaTek is one of the world’s great semiconductor companies, with exceptional expertise in system-on-chip design, connectivity, leading performance and power efficiency. Together, we’re building platforms that bring NVIDIA accelerated computing to new markets and give customers the freedom to create differentiated AI systems at enormous scale."

Scale is the key word in Huang's prepared remarks, as building custom accelerators for data centers is only half the battle. Another key challenge is actually deploying them across sprawling AI factories without running into massive networking bottlenecks. By leveraging NVLink Fusion, MediaTek ensures that custom XPUs can interconnect seamlessly with NVIDIA’s broader ecosystem, giving hyperscalers the structural framework to rapidly scale outwardly.

NVIDIA is clear that this is not limited to data center racks, though that is a major part of this expanded partnership. It also covers local AI computing where the two firms will continue to collaborate on generations of RTX Spark and DGX Spark, and in the automotive segment where the plan is to combine MediaTek's automotive system-on-chip (SoC) design chops with NVIDIA's DRIVE AGX hardware and software stack.