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Nvidia has bought $3.5 billion of convertible bonds issued by MediaTek, the companies confirmed on 31 August. The purchase covers close to 90 per cent of a $3.9 billion offering that also drew Alphabet. MediaTek called it the largest overseas convertible-bond issue in Taiwan's capital-market history.

Alongside the capital, MediaTek will adopt NVLink Fusion as the design foundation for the custom AI accelerators it builds for other companies. The platform bundles three pieces: the NVLink Fusion chiplet, which connects an accelerator to Nvidia's scale-up fabric; NVLink-C2C, which links those accelerators to Nvidia Rosa CPUs and other compatible processors; and NVHBM, which moves the memory controller from the logic die onto the memory die to raise bandwidth and free silicon area for compute.

The practical effect is that a customer designing its own AI chip has to build only the compute core. Packaging, memory architecture, interconnect and rack integration arrive pre-qualified from Nvidia and MediaTek. Those layers involve high-speed SerDes, HBM integration, multi-die packaging and thermal qualification, which are among the hardest parts of the work.