AI Weekly Malaysia

Nvidia is investing $3.5 billion in MediaTek, which will adopt Nvidia's NVLink Fusion technology to design custom AI chips for hyperscalers and AI labs that plug directly into Nvidia-based data centers. This lets Nvidia maintain dominance over data center infrastructure even as customers like AWS, Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, and Anthropic build their own silicon to reduce GPU dependency. A similar AWS deal was announced last week involving 2 million additional Nvidia GPUs and NVLink Fusion integration.

Why: If you're building AI workloads at scale or evaluating cloud GPU vs custom silicon strategies, expect custom chips from hyperscalers to increasingly interoperate with Nvidia's NVLink Fusion ecosystem rather than fully replacing it. This means Nvidia lock-in persists at the rack-scale architecture level even when companies design their own accelerators. For SEA builders, MediaTek's deepened Nvidia partnership could influence regional chip supply chains and custom silicon design services availability.