Custom AI accelerators are the fastest-growing corner of the chip market, and Nvidia is now paying to keep them wired into its own racks.
On August 31, the company disclosed a $3.5B purchase of convertible bonds in MediaTek, part of a record $3.9B overseas issue that is the largest ever priced in Taiwan’s capital market. The deal makes the Taiwanese designer a launch partner for NVLink Fusion, Nvidia’s turnkey blueprint for building custom XPUs that ride its scale-up fabric, complete with the Fusion chiplet, NVLink-C2C links and NVHBM memory blocks.
The move follows a March deal that put $2B into Marvell under the same program. Both arrangements let Nvidia monetize interconnect, memory and rack-scale systems even when the accelerator itself is not a standard GPU.
Outside the data center, the pair continues to develop PC chips for the RTX Spark and DGX Spark lines, successors to the GB10-powered DGX Spark, and is merging MediaTek’s Dimensity Auto line with Nvidia stacks for software-defined cars.
The cash helps MediaTek, a smartphone chip leader, push deeper into data center silicon against Broadcom and Marvell, while the convertible structure could later turn Nvidia into an equity holder.
