Top Taiwan Chip Designer MediaTek 'Rapidly' Shifts Focus To Autos, AI

Taiwan's top chip design company MediaTek is focusing more resources on chips for cars and AI computing as its smartphone clients face a supply glut and inflation and macroeconomic uncertainty dent demand for consumer electronics. From a report: "We are definitely moving our resources very, very rapidly towards the automotive and computing areas, because those areas will provide our growth in the next three to five years," MediaTek Chief Executive Rick Tsai told an earnings call. "In this very demanding environment, we are not reducing people. We're not increasing either. The critical thing is to allocate those precious resources," he said. Tsai said everyone, including MediaTek, was rushing to claim that they were able to support generative artificial intelligence, such as ChatGPT. "We're confident that we will be able to provide the capability to our customers," Tsai said. MediaTek is investing heavily in AI because the new areas the company is focusing on are all related to computing, Tsai said. The development of autonomous vehicles, for instance, requires AI chips.

Didn't stop to smell...

[shanen]

...the brain farts.

Does this mean ...

[Big Bipper]

Does this mean that I'll finally get that RAV4 Prime that I ordered 20 months ago ?

They have auto experince already

[ukoda]

About a decade ago I was working for an OEM that was using MediaTek chips in an Android based automotive infotainment system. The tradition problem with using SoCs designed for Android is they evolve quickly so that phones and tablets can meet the latest the price/performance demands. The automotive market on the other hand is very slow moving compared to phones and tablets so by the time an infotainment system was developed, approved and shipping in vehicles the chips in the infotainment system where nearing EOL. With auto manufactures expecting a production run that could run for years but chip maker see SoCs as having a commercial life of 2 or 3 years you have a problem.

In our case the OEM was a big player with a long and healthy relationship with MediaTek so MediaTek agreed to extend the EOL date of the chips we were using. In this respect MediaTek already have experience and creditably with the automotive so will potentially do well.