Shifting staff to AI ASICs and automotive silicon
AI has already trashed the DRAM market by gobbling up capacity for high-bandwidth memory, and now it is coming for mobile silicon, too. MediaTek is reportedly deprioritising its mobile SoC operation by diverting resources into AI ASICs.
Taiwan’s CTEE says MediaTek has shifted internal resources, including staff, away from its mobile chips division and into “blue ocean markets” such as AI ASICs and automotive silicon. A blue ocean market is one in which opportunities are plentiful and competition is thin.
MediaTek has already had a foot in Google’s custom silicon, after working on the TPU v7 Ironwood ASIC by designing input and output modules that handle comms between the processor and peripherals. It also marks a change from Google’s more recent habit of doing next-gen TPU work in tight collaboration with Broadcom.
MediaTek now wants to deepen that ASIC relationship with Google, with the next-gen TPU expected to enter volume production in Q3 2026. Google is reportedly targeting five million units in 2027 and seven million units in 2028, which is the sort of volume that eats calendars.
To get ready, Broadcom and MediaTek have increased wafer starts, and the TPU has grown more complex as it moves to TSMC’s 3nm process. MediaTek has decided it needs a dedicated ASIC team, and the easiest way to do that is to pull people from the mobile side.
The company is betting its proprietary SerDes technology will give it an edge in the ASIC market. For those who came in late, SerDes converts parallel data into a high-speed serial stream for transmission, then converts it back at the receiver, which is the kind of plumbing data centres actually pay for.
MediaTek’s 112Gb/s SerDes DSP uses a PAM-4 receiver architecture and claims more than 52dB of loss compensation at a 4nm process, with low attenuation and strong resistance to interference. It is also working on a 224Gb/s SerDes DSP, because nothing says “we mean business” like doubling the speed on the spec sheet.
MediaTek expects to earn $1 billion (€853m) from AI ASICs in 2026, rising to “several billion dollars” (at least €2.6bn) in 2027. It is also trying to pull Meta into a broader bespoke ASIC tie-up, with industry chatter framing AI as a “structural transformation of its growth engine”.
Dimensity chips remain competitive, and Qualcomm and MediaTek have lined up TSMC’s N2P process for upcoming flagship parts to push clock speeds higher without torpedoing efficiency. The worry is what happens when the mobile group is no longer the favourite child, especially in a market where the Fruity Cargo Cult Apple’s A-series and Qualcomm’s Snapdragon have been calling the shots for years.
