The smartest move Nvidia has made in years might be funding its own competition. The company is investing $3.5 billion into MediaTek, the Taiwanese chipmaker, in a deal that lets MediaTek design custom AI chips for hyperscalers while plugging those chips directly into Nvidia-powered data centers via NVLink Fusion.
This is Nvidia’s answer to a real threat. Amazon, Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, and Anthropic are all building their own chips to reduce GPU dependency. But Nvidia isn’t fighting that trend. It’s absorbing it. NVLink Fusion is the key piece here: it lets third-party chips, including custom ASICs designed by MediaTek’s cloud clients, communicate inside Nvidia’s rack-scale infrastructure. The custom chip still runs, but the data center is still Nvidia’s.
Last week, AWS struck a similar deal without the investment: 2 million additional Nvidia GPUs plus NVLink Fusion integration. The pattern is clear. Nvidia is building a coalition where defection from its GPUs doesn’t mean defection from its ecosystem.
MediaTek brings real assets to this. It already designs chips for smartphones, cars, and connected devices, and it has a growing custom data center ASIC business it expects to hit $2 billion in revenue this year. The Nvidia partnership extends that to hyperscaler clients who want custom silicon but don’t want to rebuild their entire infrastructure stack around it.
The two companies are also working together on DGX Spark, Nvidia’s desktop AI computer, RTX Spark for consumer AI PCs, and AI-powered vehicle platforms built on Nvidia Drive AGX. So this isn’t just a data center play. Nvidia is using MediaTek’s hardware reach to push into cars and edge computing too. That’s a wide net.
