📌 MediaTek Receives Investment from NVIDIA and Google to Stockpile Substrates
MediaTek’s USD 3.9 billion convertible bond financing has pushed NVIDIA and Google further along the partnership chain to become direct investors. NVIDIA subscribed to USD 3.5 billion, and Google subscribed to USD 0.4 billion. For MediaTek, this is not only additional financing; it may also mean that, as it locks in resources in advance for the AI chip supply chain, it has received financial support from key partners.
The most noteworthy potential use of this money is prepayments for the substrates required for EMIB. Prepayments essentially secure future capacity in advance, at the cost of companies having to provide cash earlier and bear the risk of capital being tied up if demand falls short of expectations. If this use is confirmed, constraints in the AI chip supply chain are no longer limited to chip design and advanced packaging, but are also beginning to extend to packaging materials.
Substrates are cited as an important bottleneck after memory, but their capacity-expansion flexibility is higher than that of memory. This means MediaTek’s advance payments may not only be addressing shortages, but may also be converting delivery certainty into order-taking capability. However, whether the use of financing, actual substrate orders, and new capacity can materialize remains a condition for validating whether this chain can hold.
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