Nvidia's $3.5B MediaTek bet reveals its plan for the AI chip buildout

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Nvidia is investing 3.5 billion dollars into Taiwanese chipmaker MediaTek through convertible bonds, with MediaTek agreeing to adopt Nvidia's NVLink Fusion technology to help design custom AI chips that can plug directly into Nvidia based data centers. The deal lands as a growing number of major cloud providers and AI labs, including Amazon, Google, Microsoft, OpenAI and Anthropic, invest in building their own custom chips specifically to reduce how dependent they are on Nvidia's own GPUs going forward

Rather than fighting that trend directly, Nvidia appears to be embracing it strategically, letting other companies build custom silicon while still ensuring that silicon has to communicate through Nvidia's proprietary NVLink Fusion interconnect fabric to actually work well inside a modern AI data center. This is Nvidia's third such investment in a chip partner capable of building custom AI accelerators this year alone, following similar earlier deals with Marvell and Intel. Last week Nvidia also announced a related partnership with Amazon Web Services, without a direct investment attached that time, where AWS will deploy an additional 2 million Nvidia GPUs alongside NVLink Fusion integration

MediaTek CEO Rick Tsai said the partnership will span cloud services, business data centers and desktop AI computers specifically, while Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang framed it in broader platform terms, saying AI is transforming every computing platform from the largest AI factories down to individual PCs and cars. Curious what people think about this strategy of financing potential competitors specifically to keep them tied to your own proprietary technical standard

Nvidia's $3.5B MediaTek bet reveals its plan for tackling Big Tech's AI chip buildout | TechCrunchtechcrunch.com