Bloomberg says ByteDance is close to buying MediaTek chips, a third alternative to restricted Nvidia GPUs

Half of the 160 to 200 billion yuan capex range is 80 to 100 billion yuan ^[8]. That is ByteDance's processor budget only if Crypto Briefing's "potentially" holds ^[4], and the reports now put three non-Nvidia suppliers in line for a share of it ^[2][3][11]. They do not include a price, a volume or a delivery date for MediaTek ^[10]. The only volumes in the story belong to the other two: 50,000 chips from Iluvatar CoreX ^[2] and "millions" of ASICs from Qualcomm ^[3]. Read "millions" as the minimum, two million, and Qualcomm's order is 40 times Iluvatar's ^[15] (a loose comparison, since Qualcomm's is a reported signed deal and Iluvatar's is still in talks).

We think this is a hedge until a volume says otherwise. A MediaTek order of 50,000 chips and one of two million would produce the same headline, and only the second would amount to replacing GPUs. If the deal signs at Qualcomm's scale, our reading is wrong. The other outcomes are a signed order too small to register against 80 to 100 billion yuan ^[8], which fits the hedge, and no deal at all, which leaves the question untested. A disclosed MediaTek volume in the millions would settle it against us.

Nvidia's stake is the one term with a price on it. The $3.5 billion is 1.75 times the $2 billion in AI ASIC revenue MediaTek is targeting for 2026 ^[5][6][9]. A stake that size is hard to justify on one year's ASIC sales, so we think the price is for the NVLink Fusion work at the center of the collaboration ^[5], and that the value arrives, if at all, after 2026.