Smartphone chip designer MediaTek Inc (聯發科) yesterday launched a new artificial intelligence (AI) data center with a maximum capacity of 45 megawatts to meet its rising demand for computing power required to develop new advanced chips for AI applications.
The company has completed the first-phase computing power buildup at the data center in Miaoli County’s Tongluo Township (銅鑼), providing 15 megawatts of capacity to support its research and development (R&D) capabilities, despite an industrywide shortage of key components, MediaTek said.
Supply constraints have plagued a wide range of key components, including memory chips, solid-state drives, power supply units and central processing units, the company said.
Photo courtesy of MediaTek Inc
The second-phase and third-phase expansions, each with an installed capacity of 15 megawatts, would be activated in accordance with the company’s business developments, MediaTek information security division deputy director Joseph Huang (黃博揚) said at a news conference.
The new AI data center provides up to 138 billion tokens per month for AI model training or inference, MediaTek said.
Tokens are units of data processed by AI models during training and inference, enabling prediction, generation and reasoning.
The token number is more than double than the 60 billion tokens consumed at the end of last year, Huang said.
Compared with leasing data center space, MediaTek believes operating an in-house data center is the most effective way to support its computing power demand and business growth, as well as cater to its functional and capability requirements, he said.
The Miaoli data center is powered by Nvidia Corp’s B200 Blackwell chips and enterprise-grade AI supercomputing infrastructure. It is also the first large-scale data center in Taiwan introducing immersion cooling technology to address the power consumption issue, reducing overall power usage effectiveness to 1.3, surpassing the world average of 1.54.
When asked whether MediaTek would consider adopting tensor processing units, which are custom-designed application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs) developed by Google, to accelerate machine learning workloads, Huang said the company would not rule it out.
For now, Nvidia chips are still the optimal choice to support MediaTek’s R&D workloads, he said.
The new data center came one week after MediaTek said it aimed to capture 10 to 15 percent of the world’s AI ASIC market, even though the market is expected to accelerate to US$80 billion next year, rather than in 2028 as had been estimated previously.
MediaTek, which tapped into the AI ASIC market in the past few years by designing AI chips for other firms, said its first AI ASIC project is to contribute about US$2 billion in revenue in the fourth quarter of this year and generate multiple billions of dollars next year.
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