Nvidia and Semiconductor Vendor Expand Partnership

Nvidia on Monday expanded its partnership with MediaTek, a large Taiwan-based semiconductor vendor that designs system-on-chip systems for smartphones, TVs and wireless communications.

The move shows how the AI hardware and software provider is trying to move beyond selling GPUs to become the provider that both big and smaller players in the AI market will use.

As part of the expanded partnership, Nvidia invested $3.5 billion in convertible bonds issued by MediaTek. MediaTek will adopt the Nvidia NVLink Fusion platform. The platform lets cloud providers integrate custom processors directly into Nvidia’s AI supercomputing ecosystem. The two vendors will work together to power PCs, AI developer supercomputers and enterprise-class workstations that incorporate Nvidia GPUs with MediaTek SoCs (system-on-chip).

The partnership comes as a growing number of Nvidia customers, including hyperscalers and frontier model makers, focus more on training and deploying their own ASICs (application-specific integrated circuits). Most recently, OpenAI introduced its first custom ASIC, Jalapeno, designed to handle AI inference. While Nvidia customers are creating their own chips to rely less on GPUs, many smaller players in the AI market are turning to infrastructure vendors that support ASICs, such as MediaTek.

A Need to Stay On Top

Therefore, through the partnership, Nvidia is looking to ensure it remains the go-to AI infrastructure provider across the market.

“It's making sure that they are the top-level brand and top-level technology provider for as many of the solutions on the market as possible,” said Ryan Shrout, president and analyst at Signal65.

He added that Nvidia has noticed that the fastest-growing part of MediaTek’s business is serving as an AI ASIC provider. Therefore, the AI chip giant sees an opportunity in MediaTek as a partner to help it become more of a platform provider for smaller AI vendors, said Chirag Shah, a professor at the University of Washington.