Nvidia invested $3.5 billion in MediaTek convertibles as the chip designer adopts NVLink Fusion
Nvidia invested $3.5 billion in convertible bonds issued by MediaTek on Monday, the companies said in a joint release. Convertible means the bonds can turn into MediaTek stock.
MediaTek will adopt Nvidia’s NVLink Fusion platform so hyperscalers, cloud providers, and frontier-model labs have a prevalidated path to design custom chips and still drop them into Nvidia’s NVLink-connected, rack-scale factories.
A custom XPU is a chip a cloud company designs for its own workloads instead of buying Nvidia’s GPU off the shelf. NVLink Fusion is the connector kit around that chip: a chiplet that talks to Nvidia’s fabric, a chip-to-chip link called NVLink-C2C, and specialized memory branded NVHBM. Customers keep the differentiated compute. Nvidia and MediaTek handle connectivity, memory, packaging, manufacturing, and the rack.
Anhata Rooprai at Reuters reports the check is part of MediaTek’s $3.9 billion overseas convertible bond offering, a record for the company. MediaTek said Alphabet also took part. It did not disclose Alphabet’s size.
I keep the $3.5 billion on the convertible line.
Joe Tigay at Rational Equity Armor Fund told Reuters Nvidia is financing MediaTek so MediaTek can develop products that extend Nvidia’s architecture. Jensen Huang told Bloomberg TV, via Reuters, “This is not circular because obviously they do their own business and we do our own business.”
Rebecca Bellan at TechCrunch lists Amazon, Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, and Anthropic among the companies investing in their own chips to be less reliant on Nvidia GPUs.
Dion Harris, an Nvidia senior director for hyperscaler infrastructure, told reporters Monday that Nvidia is an AI infrastructure company, and that it expanded beyond pure computing chips years ago.
Last week Nvidia announced a similar NVLink Fusion partnership with AWS without a direct investment, TechCrunch reports, as AWS plans to deploy an additional 2 million Nvidia GPUs. Harris said MediaTek’s extension lets customers standardize on rack-scale infrastructure across their AI factories and put custom chips “right alongside those using the same standard platform.”
AWS already got the socket. MediaTek got the socket plus $3.5 billion because it is the contractor that will put other people’s dies into it. Nvidia is paying the custom-chip house, not buying its way off the rack.
The release also names PCs, continued work on RTX Spark and DGX Spark chips that pair Nvidia GPUs with MediaTek SoCs, and cars, MediaTek Dimensity Auto with Nvidia RTX graphics working alongside DRIVE AGX. Those are the rest of the partnership.
Rick Tsai, MediaTek’s vice chairman and CEO, said Nvidia’s investment “strengthens a collaboration that spans cloud AI infrastructure, local AI computing and automotive in the era of physical AI.” MediaTek said in June it expects custom data-center ASIC work to generate $2 billion in revenue in 2026, TechCrunch notes. That is a June comment, not a Monday print.
The socket stayed Nvidia’s.