Nvidia Makes $3.5 Billion Bet on MediaTek

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Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, Radio, News. Bloomberg Tech is live from the heart of Silicon Valley with Ed Ludlow in San Francisco.

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This is Bloomberg Tech.

**Ed Ludlow** (0:24)
Coming up, Nvidia makes a $3.5 billion investment in MediaTek, deepening its collaboration with the Taiwanese chip maker. We'll hear from both CEOs. Plus, today is Tim Cook's last day as CEO of Apple before John Ternus takes the reins tomorrow. And all eyes on Anthropic as it prepares to fall publicly in the coming weeks. This is how the companies are, their own US listing plans in the second half of the year.
Okay, let's get straight to our top story. Nvidia is making another multi-billion dollar bet on the AI ecosystem, investing $3.5 billion in Taiwan's MediaTek. The partnership brings MediaTek's custom AI chips into Nvidia's architecture, plugging so-called XPUs into Nvidia high-speed networking and memory technology. The deal could also revive concerns about circular financing, as Nvidia invests across its own ecosystem. I sat down with Nvidia CEO Jensen Wang, and MediaTek CEO Rick Zai earlier today.

**Jensen Huang** (1:22)
This is not circular because obviously, they do their own business and we do our own business.
And MediaTek is already incredibly profitable, incredibly successful.
They are the world's best SOC maker. They make more SOCs than any company in the world. It's a great pleasure for us to invest in a technology company in Taiwan. It's a great pleasure for us to invest in MediaTek. This is going to turn out, of course, the investment is grounded on a deep partnership that's going to be multiple years. This is a part of the road map that we're executing on right now is a, it's not one or two years, it's a decade long. And so this partnership is extremely important to us. And we want to make sure that we have, we demonstrate every opportunity, every take every opportunity to demonstrate the importance of it, the seriousness by which we take it, the confidence we have in the partnership, and the investment that we're making here demonstrates that. But ultimately, this is going to be a phenomenal investment for us, and it's going to generate incredible returns. I have every confidence.

**Ed Ludlow** (2:29)
Rick, in July, MediaTek said that it would use its bond program, $5 billion of dollar bonds, basically to support and grow supply chain.
Earlier in our conversation, you talked about, you know, the benefit of working with Nvidia on MVLink Fusion is speed to market. What do you plan to do with the proceeds? And when you talk about supply chain, do you need to do more on Taiwanese suppliers or US suppliers in the context of this relationship?

**Rick Tsai** (2:58)
I think the, certainly, well, back in the end of July, we would not, we were not able to discuss the strategic investment part of the bond. So, but the proceeds, I think, will be for multiple purposes. Supply chain definitely being one of them, and the supply chain is a global, I mean, wherever needed to enhance and enable the customers.
But on the other hand, I think, as Jensen said so eloquently, the investment that MediaTek is a tech company, it's a very strong tech company. And we will definitely invest, if anything, more into the technology, in our capability to make the A6 chip, in the IPs for interconnects, in the advanced packaging. I think the key here is really the collaboration agreements that we have built and expanded with Nvidia, as described in our press release. Those are the key things. And the proceeds will basically go in to make those things happen better and further.

**Ed Ludlow** (4:22)
Gents, and on the earnings call last week, you talked about, with confidence, right, that the GPU-based architecture has superior economics. You were talking about that in the context of the Frontier Labs, largely because you were asked about custom silicon. You know, the simple terms of it is that MVLink Fusion makes it easy to take XPU and just drop it in to the data center.
That would show that, you know, Nvidia does see XPU coming into the market. Just the difference, if you're thinking this week, to what you outlined last week.

**Jensen Huang** (4:57)
I see XPUs in the market. It's not coming into the market, it's in the market.
Look, an XPU is a specialized chip. Nvidia's GPU is a general purpose accelerator. We accelerate the entire life cycle of AI, from data processing to pre-training, to post-training, to agentic AI inferencing. We accelerate every single AI model in the world, from closed models, every open model, video models and language models, biological models and physics models and robotics models. We literally accelerate every single area of AI.