Taiwan’s leading chip design company, MediaTek, has said a sharp rise in demand for artificial intelligence applications is putting pressure on global supply chains and pushing up costs, prompting the firm to adjust its own prices in response.
Speaking on Wednesday during the company’s quarterly earnings conference call, MediaTek Chief Executive Rick Tsai said the company remains highly confident about its outlook, citing strong momentum from the AI boom, but cautioned that supply chain constraints are becoming a growing challenge.”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,” he said.
“We will also adjust our pricings to reflect the rising supply chain costs and allocate our supply across products based on the overall profitability,” Tsai added, without elaborating.
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He reiterated comments given on the company’s last earnings call in October that MediaTek expects to earn revenue of billions of dollars from its AI accelerator ASIC chips by 2027.
The total addressable market (TAM) for data centre ASIC chips is now estimated at $50-70 billion, $20 billion more than the previous estimate, Tsai added.
MediaTek has partnered with Nvidia (NVDA.O), opens new tab to co-design the GB10 Grace Blackwell Superchip used in Nvidia’s DGX Spark, a personal AI supercomputer that went on sale last year.
Tsai, who attended Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang’s high profile dinner with Taiwanese suppliers on Saturday in Taipei, said MediaTek had observed “very positive feedback” for DGX Spark, and expected its revenue growth to accelerate into 2026.
On Wednesday, MediaTek reported fourth-quarter revenue of T$150.2 billion ($4.76 billion), up 8.8% from a year earlier, while net income was down 3.6% at T$23.1 billion.
MediaTek shares have gained 26% this year, outperforming a rise of 11.5% on the benchmark index (.TWII), opens new tab. The stock closed up 0.3% on Wednesday ahead of its earnings release.
TSMC last month posted a forecast-smashing 35% jump in fourth-quarter profit to a record high.
($1 = 31.5440 Taiwan dollars)
