Opinion: Nvidia's investment in MediaTek may be 'picking' the next-generation ASIC winner

PANews reported on September 1 that “White-Haired Stock God” Serenity posted on X stating that with Nvidia’s $3.5 billion investment in MediaTek, Nvidia appears to be proactively “selecting” potential winners in the next-generation ASIC (application-specific integrated circuit) space through capital and strategic partnerships, with Marvell and MediaTek possibly emerging as representative examples.

Nvidia’s approach is similar to its earlier support for the neocloud companies Nebius and CoreWeave, namely by helping potential industry leaders grow and then establishing deep financial and strategic ties with them, thereby consolidating its dominant position in the AI infrastructure supply chain. This strategy could have a “second-order impact” on Broadcom, weakening its relative advantage in the ASIC field, while also potentially prompting AMD, Broadcom, and some large cloud service providers to further strengthen their cooperation.

Serenity believes Nvidia’s move is especially noteworthy because it will further consolidate its strategic position in the AI inference market and may also weaken the previous bearish logic that “hyperscalers’ self-developed ASICs will challenge Nvidia over the long term.”