英伟达35亿美元投资联发科，深化AI芯片合作

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This is Bloomberg Tech. 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 Turnis takes the reigns tomorrow. And all eyes on Anthropic as it prepares to file publicly in the coming weeks. This as other companies eye 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 highspeed 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 Wong and MediaTek CEO Rick Zy earlier today.

This is not circular because obviously uh they do their own business and we do our own business and and uh MediaTek is already incredibly profitable, incredibly successful. They are one they are the world's best SOC maker. They make more SOC's than any company in the world. Uh 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. Uh 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 this is a partner the roadmap that we're 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 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.

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

I think the uh certainly well back in uh end of July uh we would not uh we were not able to discuss the strategic investment part of the bank. So uh 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. uh but on the other hand I think uh as Jensen said so uh so eloquently uh the investment that MediaTek is a tech company is a very strong tech company and we will definitely invest if if anything more into the technology in the our capability to design in our capability to make the ASIC chip in in the IPS for interconnects in advanced packaging I think the uh the key here is really the collaboration agreements that we have built and expanded with Avidia as described in our press release.

Those are the key things and the proceeds will basically go to make those things happen better and further. Jensen 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 just makes it easy to take XPU and and just drop it into the data center.

That would show that you know Nvidia does see XPU coming into the market. just the difference of your thinking this week to to what you outlined last week.

I see XPUs in the market. It's not coming into the market. It's in the market. Um look, an XPU is a specialized chip. Nvidia's GPU is a general purpose accelerator. We accelerate we accelerate the entire life cycle of AI from data processing which data processing to pre-training to post-training to agentic AI inferencing. We accelerate uh every single AI model in the world from closed models every closed model every open model uh video models and language models biological models and physics models and robotics models.

We literally accelerate every single area of AI. Um, that explains why it is that we are the most funible and the most durable and therefore the most rentable GPU, the most rentable computer infrastructure in the world. We're in every cloud. We're onrem. We're at the edge. And so we're able to address markets that frankly nobody else can because of the architecture of our company and the entire full stack AI factory platform that we have.

Let's get more on the story with Bloomberg's Ian King who helped me break it this morning. It's really interesting. You know, for some time now, Gentleman's been asked about what about all these custom chips that hyperscalers are working on, that the Frontier Labs are working on. And to this point, he's been a little bit dismissive of of the threat. Today, with MediaTek, they found a mechanism for those same AI companies to drop an XPU or a custom chip into an existing data center to work with Nvidia's technology.

What else do we need to know here? Yeah, I mean take taking a step back and looking at this from a technology perspective. Uh the way the data center works and how effective it is isn't just how good are the individual components. It's how good do they all link together. And what Nvidia is saying is hey use our link use the you know this fabric they call it and to bind everything together and uh it'll work it'll all work better.

So what what he's trying to do is even if you want to go it alone, even if you want to use your own stuff, use it inside our framework, use it inside our house and that'll help you. And of course that means in terms of business that look, hey, if companies want to do their own thing like Amazon did with that announcement we saw during earnings, they're going to do it and they're still going to be using at least some of his chips.

So it works business-wise.

Just we haven't said it to this point, so I'll say it now for the audience. This is Nvidia buying convertible bonds that convert into equity. $3.5 billion we confirmed is Nvidia's biggest non- US direct investment. So kind of interesting, but probably talk a little bit more about MediaTek, right? What is MediaTek? What is it comparable to here in the US?

Yeah. No, that's a very good question. This this very important company that nobody really pays that much attention to. Think they're the Taiwanese equivalent of Qualcomm. They make smartphone processors, smartphone modems, you know, the real guts of that. They have a large presence in the China market and large presence worldwide. They in by numbers, they're one of the biggest companies. Um, and that's really what they've done and they're looking to expand.

But in AS6, they're more like Marll or Broadcom, aren't they?

That's right. This is what they're trying to do. They're trying to basically take that expertise that they developed in smartphones and expand that into the data center, which is a more lucrative business. And what they're doing is trying to replicate what Broadcom does, what Marll does, which is help, say Google, say Amazon. Hey, you've got this great idea for a chip. You've got these specifications. We'll get you all the way there.

Bloomberg's Ian King, who broke the story with me this morning, and it's one of the most read today on the Blo

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