Nvidia (NVDA) has agreed to invest $3.5 billion in Taiwanese chipmaker MediaTek, per a statement Monday morning, deepening Nvidia’s already large web of investments throughout the AI ecosystem.
“NVIDIA and MediaTek today announced a deepening of their longstanding collaboration to build the next generations of AI computing platforms — spanning AI infrastructure, local AI computing and automotive,” the companies said in a joint statement, noting the combination will combine Nvidia’s computing platforms with MediaTek’s chip design capabilities.
Shares in Nvidia trended up by roughly 1% on Monday morning.
The deal is set to broaden an existing partnership between the two AI companies. Under this round of investment, MediaTek will use Nvidia’s NVLink Fusion technology, among other applications, which functions as connective tissue that allows customers to plug their own chips into Nvidia’s underlying data center architecture.
NVLink Fusion will allow MediaTek to “provide hyperscalers, cloud service providers and frontier model developers with a prevalidated path to develop custom XPUs and bring them into NVIDIA NVLink™-connected, rack-scale AI factories,” the companies said in their statement.
The investment from Nvidia — adding to billions of dollars Jensen Huang’s company has invested in companies throughout the AI ecosystem — comes as Nvidia increasingly focuses on positioning its technology as the base architecture for the AI build-out, moving toward a place where the entire AI ecosystem runs on Nvidia’s systems.
“The part that people don’t see about our growth because we’re practically singular because of the nature of how we deliver products. I mean we’re the only company in the world that creates and builds, offers an entire AI factory platform, a full-stack system,” Huang said on the company’s second quarter earnings call.