MediaTek is developing an Arm-based server processor and an associated data-center AI accelerator (NPU) according to Taiwan’s Economic Daily (經濟日報). The thinly sourced article states the TSMC-fabbed 3 nm chips will begin production in 2H25.
Without additional information, the story doesn’t make sense—and not only because it’s in Chinese. It’s unlikely MediaTek would embark on such a project without customer (or government) sponsorship. Even by reducing development costs by licensing Arm Neoverse CSS macros, building a server processor is costly. Developing a data-center-class NPU from scratch and associated software is even more expensive and time consuming, although licensing a design from a company like Tenstorrent would reduce this cost. Hyperscalers such as Amazon, Google, Meta, and Microsoft already have Arm-based server processors and NPUs. Enterprises will stick with x86 and Nvidia.
That leaves the largest enterprises (e.g., Walmart) and large-but-not-hyperscale businesses (e.g., Netflix). Competition for these opportunities is fierce. Companies from startups to behemoth Intel are racing to deliver NPU alternatives to Nvidia’s GPUs. Although served by the x86 duopoly, the server-processor market is competitive.
It’s not that MediaTek can’t make good data-center chips, but rather that it needs a solid business case to do so.