NVIDIA puts $3.5B into MediaTek for custom AI silicon

NVIDIA invested $3.5 billion in convertible bonds issued by MediaTek as the chipmakers expanded a partnership spanning custom AI infrastructure, local computing and vehicles. In its announcement of the NVLink Fusion collaboration, NVIDIA says MediaTek will give hyperscalers and frontier-model developers a prevalidated route to connect custom XPUs to NVIDIA rack-scale systems. For builders, this is less a second-source GPU than a signal that custom silicon is being invited inside NVIDIA’s fabric; the archive’s capex analysis explains why that boundary matters. Treat NVLink compatibility as a strategic dependency to price, not merely an interconnect feature.