Serenity
AI & Semiconductor Supply-Chain Researcher, Trader
MediaTek gains three ways from AI, as compute spending grows, TPUs take a larger share of it and MediaTek takes a larger share of each TPU's bill of materials. @KairosPraxis adds that MediaTek designs the TPUv9 ASIC, has close TSMC ties amid a wafer shortage and could gain if AI capex shifts to cheaper players. @KairosPraxis also sees it as largely a TPU story, where any execution delay would sink the stock, with mobile flat to down. x.comÂ
MediaTek has ample ASIC opportunity as Google's TPU ramp accelerates and Broadcom's pricing becomes a problem for Google. Per Mizuho, TPU shipments could top 35M in 2028, about 8x 2026, while Broadcom's CoWoS plus N3 package has become expensive. MediaTek's potential challenges are 224G SerDes IP integration and EMIB-T packaging yields, though checks by @sssjeffpu put EMIB-T above 95%, so yield should not be a major problem now. Intel and Broadcom also have ASIC opportunities. x.comÂ
MediaTek's upside from designing Google's TPU looks limited because inference is the bigger market and the biggest players have their own chips. They will push their own silicon as much as possible and have no incentive to try TPUs; TPU had an edge two years ago, but Google did not act in time. That counters @KairosPraxis's case that the market underestimates MediaTek's TPUv9 ASIC work. x.comÂ
Broadcom is depending on a massive Anthropic and OpenAI ramp over the next two years as Google becomes less and less important to it. CEO Hock Tan gave exact gigawatt figures for every customer except Google, which got only a vague tens of billions, a bad sign that MediaTek has taken share. x.comÂ
MediaTek remains arguably attractive after strong Q2 earnings driven by Google TPU upgrades. Q4 2026 ASIC revenue was raised to over $2B and 2027 ASIC revenue to about $12-16B from $7-12B. Smart Edge strength cushioned weak smartphone sales, and it is engaged with several new ASIC customers, rumored to include SpaceX. Negatives: higher opex hurts operating margins, future TPU gross margins won't improve, and some Smart Edge revenue reflects passed-on memory costs. x.comÂ
Broadcom and MediaTek risk losing chip ownership and margin as hyperscalers pull custom silicon in-house for platform control and margin. @jukan05 relays a rumor that Google will move to customer-owned tooling from TPU v9, ordering wafers directly from TSMC like AWS's Annapurna and reducing Broadcom and MediaTek to IP and design-service roles at lower per-chip margins. Even if not now, it will happen eventually, because the end state is all about optimization. x.comÂ
MediaTek gains a foothold in high-end PC silicon, a market it has never had, through Nvidia's RTX Spark. The chip combines a Grace CPU and Blackwell GPU on TSMC 3nm with 70 billion transistors and was built with MediaTek; Jensen Huang called out MediaTek chairman Rick Tsai by name, showing a deep partnership. More broadly, Huang said 100 GW of AI factories will come online before the decade ends at $80-100 billion per GW, bullish for the whole supply chain. x.comÂ
Google's MediaTek-built TPU v9 should lift Semtech's content per chip. Per @StockSavvyShay, the Triggerfish variant adds SRAM, HBM4E memory and a simulation die, so data must travel farther and faster in the rack, pushing electrical links to their limit. MediaTek's SerDes is leaner than Broadcom's, so links need extra help, which Semtech's signal conditioners and redrivers supply; Google reportedly already relies on them. More Semtech parts attach with every accelerator Google ships. x.comÂ
Broadcom and MediaTek risk being bypassed after Google reportedly told TSMC it wants to become a major direct customer, per Tech Taiwan. That points to Google's ultimate goal of an Apple-style COT model, though both partners internally still see the shift as a distant threat. x.com x.comÂ
Architecture changes could lift TSMC wafer demand. Shifting from 12-high to 8-high lifts volumes; an on-device AI phone upgrade cycle would be enormously bullish, while ASIC gains over Nvidia help because ASICs use more wafers. TSMC is arguably more vital to AI buildout than MAG stocks and a reasonable extended-AI-cycle play at a not-crazy multiple, barring big macro events. Margins may not expand as capex rises; a Terrafab partnership, if it happens, would somewhat ease Intel competition risk. … Show more