MediaTek, yapay zeka veri merkezi çipleri için 5 milyar $ finansman planlıyor

MediaTek plans $5 billion financing for AI data-center chips

Wen-Yee Lee

Fri, July 31, 2026 at 2:07 PM GMT+3 2 min read

• 2454.TW +9.89%

By Wen-Yee Lee

TAIPEI, July 31 (Reuters) - MediaTek, Taiwan's largest chip designer, said on Friday its board had approved a discretionary financing budget of $5 billion to support long-term growth, including ‌its expansion into AI chips for data centers.

The plan highlights the company's push to reduce ‌its reliance on smartphones and become a significant supplier of custom AI chips, known as ASICs, to major cloud providers.

Although the ​market is dominated by a small group of players, rapidly rising spending on AI infrastructure is giving MediaTek, best known for smartphone processors, an opportunity to expand into a faster-growing and higher-margin business.

"This flexible framework provides us with the optionality, when needed, to agilely support our long-term growth and capitalize on massive data ‌center opportunities," Chief Executive Rick Tsai said ⁠on an earnings call.

The company raised its estimate of the addressable market for custom AI chips in 2027 to $80 billion, from a previous range of $70 billion to $80 ⁠billion. It also increased its target share of that market to 15% to 20% from 10% to 15%.

Tsai said MediaTek had successfully developed its first custom AI chip, with production set to begin in the fourth ​quarter. A ​second chip remains on track for volume production in ​2028.

MediaTek expects its data-center AI chip business ‌to generate more than $2 billion in revenue in 2026.

SMARTPHONE WEAKNESS

MediaTek said its mobile-chip revenue fell 20% in the second quarter from a year earlier as higher component costs weighed on smartphone demand.

Global smartphone shipments dropped 11% in the quarter to their lowest level for the period since 2013, according to preliminary estimates from Counterpoint Research, as a memory-chip shortage pushed up handset prices.

"As rising costs across the supply ‌chain have become an industry-wide reality, we are taking pricing ​actions to ensure these increases are appropriately reflected in our ​product pricing," Tsai said.

"Our view for global ​smartphone shipment remains unchanged and we continue to expect the market to decline by ‌about 15% in units this year," he ​added.

MediaTek, a customer of TSMC, ​is the second-most valuable company on the Taiwan stock exchange, with a market capitalisation of $176 billion.

The company reported quarterly revenue of T$152.18 billion ($4.71 billion), up 1.2% from a year earlier. Net ​income fell 12.3% to T$24.6 ‌billion.

MediaTek shares closed up 9.9% on Friday ahead of the results and have risen 148.6% ​this year, compared with a 48.9% gain in Taiwan's benchmark index.

(Reporting by Wen-Yee Lee ​in Taipei. Editing by Eduardo Baptista and Mark Potter)