Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang Says His $3.5 Billion MediaTek Deal Is ‘Not Circular’ Because ‘They Do Their Own Business’

Nvidia (NVDA) CEO Jensen Huang was asked on Monday whether the company's newest investment is the kind of circular financing investors keep worrying about, and he said it was not. “This is not circular because obviously they do their own business and we do our own business, and MediaTek is already incredibly profitable, incredibly successful,” Huang told Bloomberg's Ed Ludlow in an interview alongside MediaTek CEO Rick Tsai on Aug. 31.

The deal that prompted the question is worth $3.5 billion, and one detail about it has been widely flattened. Nvidia is not buying MediaTek shares. It bought $3.5 billion of convertible bonds issued by the company, part of an overseas convertible offering of roughly $3.9 billion in which Alphabet (GOOGL) also participated at an undisclosed size. Nvidia holds debt that can convert later, not equity today, and the release names no conversion price, no valuation, and no resulting stake.

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The partnership itself covers three things. MediaTek will adopt Nvidia's NVLink Fusion, enabling its customers to build custom accelerators that slot into Nvidia's rack-scale systems. It will also co-develop chips for Nvidia's desktop AI machines, having already worked on the Grace Blackwell superchip inside them. Finally, its Dimensity Auto platforms will ship with Nvidia graphics. Both companies describe it as an extension of an existing partnership.

Circular financing, in plain terms, is the worry that a supplier funds a customer, the customer spends the money back with the supplier, and revenue that looks like demand is partly the supplier's own capital making a round trip. 

The comparison set is real, and Nvidia has built it deliberately. Nvidia committed up to $100 billion to OpenAI in September 2025 tied to deploying 10 gigawatts of its systems, then disclosed in a quarterly filing months later that there was no assurance any of it would be completed on the expected terms. The company also took a $5 billion stake in Intel (INTC), which was announced in the same month and closed in December. In November 2025, Nvidia committed up to $10 billion to Anthropic, in a deal where Anthropic separately committed to buying Nvidia's Grace Blackwell and Vera Rubin systems. Barchart has covered the structure before in Nvidia's revenue-sharing deals with AI startups, and Huang has said there is no AI bubble when pressed on the same underlying worry.

Huang's distinction is not rhetorical, and the piece is worse without it. MediaTek is not a startup that exists because Nvidia funded it. It is a 29-year-old fabless designer listed in Taipei, Taiwan with a market value around NT$6.9 trillion. MediaTek is profitable independently of anything Nvidia does, selling smartphone, television, and automotive chips to customers that have nothing to do with AI data centers. That is a materially different case from writing a check to a company whose entire compute budget comes back to you. An Nvidia spokesman, Dion Harris, framed Nvidia on the announcement call as a company that "expanded beyond pure computing chips years ago."

MediaTek's own shares tell the more dramatic half of the story, and almost nobody in the U.S. saw it, because the announcement landed after Taipei had closed. The stock finished Aug. 31 at NT$3,925, down 1.5% on no knowledge of the deal. On Sept. 1, MediaTek stock opened at NT$4,315 and stayed there, up 9.9%, effectively limit-up. 

What would settle the circularity question is not a quote from either chief executive. It is a disclosure line. Nvidia reports its strategic investments and their carrying values in its quarterly filings, and it reports revenue by customer concentration. If money placed into partners starts showing up as revenue from the same partners at a scale worth naming, the filings will say so before any interview does.