MediaTek Taps Intel Packaging in $5B AI Chip Push
2 min readMediaTek has confirmed it will use Intel’s advanced packaging technology alongside TSMC’s for its custom AI chips, the first time Taiwan’s biggest fabless chip designer has publicly acknowledged working with Intel on packaging. The move comes as MediaTek’s board signs off on a US$5 billion budget to lock down supply chain capacity.
Two packaging suppliers, not one
Advanced packaging is the step where multiple chip dies and stacks of high bandwidth memory get assembled into a single accelerator. It has become the tightest bottleneck in the AI hardware supply chain, and TSMC’s CoWoS process has been the industry default. MediaTek will keep using CoWoS, but it is adding Intel’s EMIB-T as a second option.
Chief executive Rick Tsai framed the decision as customer driven. Demand for data center AI chips is strong, and different customers want different tradeoffs, so offering more than one packaging path gives MediaTek flexibility that a single sourced supply chain cannot.
A bid for a fifth of the custom accelerator market
MediaTek is best known for smartphone system on chip designs, but it has spent the past two years pushing into custom AI accelerators, the application specific chips that hyperscalers commission instead of buying Nvidia parts off the shelf. The company now says it wants up to 20 percent of the serviceable available market for custom AI accelerators next year, and it is expanding from chip design toward full systems and platforms.
The US$5 billion budget is the enabling piece. Capacity for advanced packaging and high bandwidth memory has to be reserved well ahead of production, and companies without committed allocations have repeatedly found themselves unable to ship. MediaTek has already flagged supply chain tightness and warned it will adjust prices accordingly.
Why it matters
Two things stand out. Dual sourcing packaging is a hedge against the CoWoS crunch that has constrained the entire AI accelerator market, and it hands Intel a meaningful external customer for a foundry business badly in need of one. If EMIB-T works at volume for MediaTek, other designers will look at it.
The second is competitive. A serious second source of custom accelerators strengthens the hyperscalers’ hand against Nvidia pricing. Watch for named customer wins and for whether MediaTek’s 20 percent target survives contact with actual 2027 allocations.