Nvidia said on 31 August that it will invest $3.5 billion in MediaTek, the Taiwanese chip designer, through bonds that convert into MediaTek stock. Bloomberg reported it as Nvidia’s largest direct investment outside the United States. The two firms already collaborate on processors for Arm-based PCs, and the new money widens that to data-centre and in-vehicle silicon.
At the centre of the deal is NVLink Fusion, Nvidia’s interconnect that lets accelerators it did not design slot into its rack-scale systems. MediaTek will use it to build custom chips for large cloud operators. Dion Harris of Nvidia said the company expanded beyond selling compute chips years ago and now describes itself as an infrastructure company. Jensen Huang tied the move to AI reaching the PC and the car. No MediaTek executive was quoted.
The backdrop is that Amazon, Google, Microsoft, OpenAI and Anthropic are all designing their own accelerators to lean less on Nvidia’s graphics processors, a shift EMRGNG has tracked through Google’s chip arrangements with Marvell. NVLink Fusion is the response. If a customer’s own chip does the calculation, Nvidia still sells the fabric that connects it and still books the sale. Analysts described the MediaTek investment as a tollbooth on that traffic.
What MediaTek gave up in return has not been set out. There is no disclosed stake size, no conversion price, no volume commitment and no closing date, and nothing on whether regulators in Taipei or Washington need to approve it. The figure is public. The terms that would show what Nvidia bought for its $3.5 billion are not.
