Nvidia pours $3.5 billion into MediaTek — company will adopt NVLink Fusion for its custom AI accelerators

Nvidia pours $3.5 billion into MediaTek — company will adopt NVLink Fusion for its custom AI accelerators

Having become the world's largest supplier of AI accelerators, Nvidia does not have direct rivals of comparable size. However, in a world where custom AI accelerators are becoming more widespread as more companies see benefits in bespoke solutions, Nvidia must hedge against their rise and ensure that its addressable market expands even if it does not win every accelerator design. One of the ways to achieve this is to spread its NVLink Fusion platform beyond its own products and to popularize it among users of custom hardware. The deal with MediaTek is aimed at exactly that.

AWS, Google , Meta, Microsoft , and now OpenAI are developing their own AI accelerators partly to reduce dependence on expensive merchant GPUs. Nvidia cannot necessarily prevent this trend, so NVLink Fusion gives it another strategy: if customers replace some Nvidia GPUs with their own XPUs, Nvidia wants those XPUs connected using NVLink, paired with Nvidia CPUs where appropriate, and deployed within Nvidia networking and rack architectures. Under the new arrangement, customers can bring an XPU architecture to MediaTek, then MediaTek and Nvidia will supply much of the technology surrounding the actual compute engine.

MediaTek will use NVLink Fusion as the foundation for custom accelerators that can evolve alongside future Nvidia architectures. The platform includes the NVLink Fusion chiplet, which connects custom XPUs to Nvidia's NVLink scale-up fabric using electrical or photonic interconnects; NVLink-C2C, which provides high-bandwidth, energy-efficient links between XPUs, Nvidia Rosa CPUs, and other compatible processors; and Nvidia NVHBM, which enables customized memory configurations and reserves more silicon area for compute.

Using Nvidia's NVLink Fusion platform for custom AI accelerators enables potential MediaTek customers to concentrate on their differentiated compute architecture while Nvidia and MediaTek provide connectivity, memory architecture, packaging, manufacturing, and rack-level technologies. Essentially, MediaTek's customers will get a pre-developed rack-scale platform for their custom AI accelerators, something they cannot get elsewhere. Since Nvidia tends to supply AI infrastructure platforms, not just AI accelerators, the deal with MediaTek fits perfectly into its strategy.

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