The Taiwanese chip designer MediaTek said that the surge in artificial intelligence applications is straining supply chains and pushing up costs, so it will adjust its pricing accordingly.
Taiwanese tech firms have benefited from the AI boom, and MediaTek and TSMC have both reported stronger results as customers allocate more capital to compute.
MediaTek’s chief executive Rick Tsai told the company’s quarterly earnings call: “With AI serving as a catalyst for industry expansion and driving the surge in demand, the global supply chain is facing challenges in fully meeting the increasing needs in 2026, resulting in higher costs across the supply chain.”
Tsai added: “We will also adjust our pricing to reflect the rising supply chain costs and allocate our supply across products based on the overall profitability.”
While he did not specify which product becomes more expensive first, Tsai reiterated earlier guidance that MediaTek expects to generate billions of US dollars in revenue from its AI accelerator ASIC chips by 2027. He said the total addressable market for data centre ASICs is now pegged at $50bn to $70bn a year, up $20bn from the previous estimate.
MediaTek has partnered with Nvidia to co-design the GB10 Grace Blackwell Superchip used in Nvidia’s DGX Spark, the personal AI supercomputer that went on sale last year.
Tsai said MediaTek has seen “very positive feedback” for DGX Spark and expects revenue growth to accelerate into 2026, which is corporate-speak for more orders and more chaos.
MediaTek reported fourth-quarter revenue of T$150.2bn (€4.03bn) and said that was up 8.8 per cent year on year, while net income fell 3.6 per cent to T$23.1bn (€620m). MediaTek shares are up 26 per cent so far this year, ahead of an 11.5 per cent rise in the benchmark index, and the stock closed up 0.3 per cent before the earnings dropped.
