Teng Yan
Founder of Tessara, AI Buildout & Supply-Chain Research
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
MediaTek should heavily outperform over the next two years. It is preferred over Qualcomm, which has photonics upside from acquisitions such as Alphawave's optical networking IP but too much exposure to China. x.com x.comÂ
Broadcom's integrated optics, electronics and packaging could lower custom-chip system costs because separate suppliers defend their margins. At similar valuations, it is preferred to Nvidia and has more room to beat expectations. Google TPU v8 shipments are estimated at 4.0M in 2026 and 9.1M in 2027, assuming Broadcom supplies the remainder after MediaTek's allocation. Anthropic financing adds value only if chip profit exceeds likely support payments and capacity costs. x.com 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
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
A rising value of compute per watt should benefit AI cloud, chip, connectivity and power suppliers. Elon Musk says that value will rise over time. Nebius has Microsoft and Meta deals; Marvell benefits from custom silicon demand; Credo connects GPUs; Vistra has long-term nuclear supply deals with Amazon and Meta; Nokia's Nvidia partnership could help it capture data-center networking growth. x.com 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
AI infrastructure bottlenecks could give eight stocks as much as 18x upside. Nvidia supplies frontier-model GPUs; Broadcom and Marvell supply custom silicon and networking; TSMC makes advanced chips; Micron supplies sold-out HBM; Vertiv provides power and cooling; Palantir monetizes enterprise AI; Alphabet spans TPUs, research, cloud and apps. The list tracks where AI infrastructure spending is flowing. x.com 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
NVIDIA, AMD, Broadcom, Marvell, MediaTek and Cadence could not look more bearish, because hyperscalers don't want to work with them and are incentivized to cut them out. NVIDIA in particular is being disintermediated by Google's TPU program while priced like a monopoly; a post the author replies to notes it is now worth more than the GDP of every country except the US and China. 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
