Top Taiwan chip designer MediaTek rapidly shifts focus to autos, AI

Taiwan’s high chip design firm MediaTek is focusing extra assets on chips for vehicles and AI computing as its smartphone purchasers face a provide glut and inflation and macroeconomic uncertainty dent demand for client electronics.

“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 Inc chief government Rick Tsai informed an earnings name.

“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 mentioned.
Tsai mentioned everybody, together with MediaTek, was dashing to say that they had been capable of help generative synthetic intelligence, comparable to ChatGPT.

“We’re confident that we will be able to provide the capability to our customers,” Tsai mentioned.

MediaTek is investing closely in AI as a result of the brand new areas the corporate is specializing in are all associated to computing, Tsai mentioned. The improvement of autonomous autos, as an example, requires AI chips.

While smartphone demand has remained lacklustre within the first quarter, the corporate expects indicators of restoration later this yr. “Demand for certain consumer electronics such as smartphones is weaker than we expected,” Tsai mentioned. “As customers remain cautious about future demand, we expect our mobile revenue to be flattish in the second quarter and to improve in the second half.”

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