NVIDIA and MediaTek Team Up to Take the PC Market While Qualcomm Expands to Data Center
Zero One Daily Intelligence Brief — June 1, 2026
NVIDIA and MediaTek Team Up to Take the PC Market While Qualcomm Expands to Data Center
Top Market Signals
MediaTek co-designs NVIDIA's first Windows superchip
MediaTek (2454 TT) co-designed the CPU inside NVIDIA's (NVDA US) RTX Spark, the first PC superchip NVIDIA has built for Windows, formally putting the Taiwanese chip designer into the Windows PC market and opening an Arm-based attack on the x86 turf held by Intel (INTC US) and AMD (AMD US).
NVIDIA chief executive Jensen Huang unveiled RTX Spark at GTC Taipei on 1 June, pairing a Blackwell RTX GPU with a 20-core Grace-class CPU built on TSMC's (2330 TT) 3nm process. The chip carries 1 petaflop of AI compute and 128GB of unified memory, and the CPU, codenamed N1X, was developed jointly with MediaTek. Huang called it a 40-year reinvention of the PC with Microsoft (MSFT US), with secure sandboxes the two companies built together to run AI agents on the device.
MediaTek's role is the structural read. Chief executive Rick Tsai said NVIDIA is both a customer and a co-design partner, and that a chip this complex built by two separate companies is something the global industry rarely sees. Senior vice president Vince Hu framed RTX Spark as MediaTek's formal entry into Windows PCs as a technology supplier, extending the partnership that already produced the DGX Spark developer machine and its GB10 chip.
Our 29 May 2026 Blade flagged exactly this: N1X Arm laptop silicon and a Windows-on-Arm push were named as a near-term catalyst to watch. The launch lands with a deep bench of device makers, with more than 30 laptops and 10 desktops due this fall from ASUS, Dell (DELL US), HP, Lenovo (992 HK), Microsoft Surface and MSI, and Microsoft branding its own model the most powerful Surface Laptop it has built. The history is a caution: Microsoft wrote off US$900m on an earlier NVIDIA Arm-based Surface RT in 2013, so the question is whether software breadth, now more than 100 Windows titles including Adobe and Xbox, finally makes Windows on Arm stick.
Linked stocks: 2454 TT, NVDA US, 2330 TT, INTC US
Sources: 經濟日報, TechCrunch, 輝達、聯發科打造超級晶片 RTX Spark開啟AI PC新篇章
Washington moves to close the overseas-China chip loophole
The US Commerce Department published new export guidance on Sunday requiring advanced-chip licenses for China-headquartered companies even when those entities sit outside China, an attempt to shut a year-old gap that let NVIDIA Blackwell and AMD MI350X chips reach Chinese firms through third countries.
According to Reuters reporting carried by Liberty Times, the Bureau of Industry and Security said the guidance clarifies license requirements in place since 2023 and that it will keep enforcing controls to protect critical US technology. An industry source familiar with the supply chain estimated that hundreds of thousands of advanced chips have already flowed to Chinese-controlled entities in places such as Malaysia. A circulated government document put it bluntly, saying the gate on the loophole had quietly opened.
The gap traces to May 2025, when Commerce said it would not enforce the prior administration's tiered AI Diffusion rule. A former State Department official said overseas subsidiaries of Chinese firms had been able to buy Blackwell chips without applying for a license, and probably did so at scale.
One limit is visible in the text. The guidance does not require TSMC or other foundries to run extra due diligence to keep the high-end AI chips they manufacture out of Chinese shell companies, so the enforcement burden still sits upstream of the fabs. Separately, Bloomberg reported that NVIDIA chips are being sought by Chinese labs with military ties, underlining why the diversion route draws scrutiny.
Linked stocks: NVDA US, AMD US, 2330 TT
Sources: 美先進晶片禁令 擴及海外中企, Google News
Anthropic files for IPO ahead of OpenAI
Anthropic filed confidentially for a US initial public offering on Monday, pulling ahead of OpenAI in the race to list and turning the two startups' funding contest into a public-market one.
Bloomberg reported that Anthropic's first-mover filing positions it to widen its lead over OpenAI as both companies spend heavily to fund frontier model development. The filing is the clearest sign yet that the largest privately held AI labs intend to tap public capital, with SpaceX and OpenAI also reported to be testing the market.
Our 28 May 2026 Blade flagged Anthropic pulling ahead of OpenAI in its US$65bn raise, with every major memory chip maker joining the round. The IPO filing is that same race moving one rung up, from private rounds backed by strategic investors toward a public listing that would mark the AI model layer to a daily share price.
The read-through for the supply chain is demand visibility rather than a direct trade. A listed Anthropic would publish capacity and spending plans on a fixed calendar, giving the GPU, memory and data-center vendors that sell into it a clearer line of sight than private fundraising disclosures allow.
Linked stocks: NVDA US, MSFT US
Sources: Bloomberg, Google News
Foxconn opens a European front in sovereign AI
Foxconn (2317 TT) will build AI servers and infrastructure in France and the Czech Republic with French computing firm Bull, its first move into Europe's sovereign-AI market, with an initial investment above EUR120m.
According to Economic Daily News, Foxconn will run manufacturing and initial testing at its Pardubice plant in the Czech Republic, then handle assembly, final integration and system-level validation at Bull's plant in Angers, France. The deal pairs Bull's AI system design and go-to-market position with Foxconn's manufacturing scale, and follows sovereign-AI engagements Foxconn has already taken on in the US, Japan, the Middle East and Africa.
The strategic point is localization. Sovereign-AI buyers want compute built and validated inside their own borders, and Foxconn is positioning its European footprint as the production layer for nationally controlled AI capacity rather than exporting finished racks from Asia. Bull chief executive Emmanuel Le Roux framed the tie-up as concrete progress toward competitive made-in-Europe AI infrastructure.
The same day, a Foxconn executive said its own factories have run AI for two years, lifting production-scheduling efficiency by 50% and raising precision to 90%, with NVIDIA's Omniverse simulation platform enabling flexible manufacturing lines.
Linked stocks: 2317 TT, NVDA US
Sources: 鴻海揮軍歐洲主權 AI 市場 與法商 Bull 合作 在當地生產 AI 伺服器
Qualcomm bets on agents and enters the data center
Qualcomm (QCOM US) chief executive Cristiano Amon used the COMPUTEX 2026 opening keynote to declare 2026 the year of the agent and to preview Dragonfly, a new data-center product line that takes Qualcomm beyond phones and into the server market, with details promised at a 24 June investor day.
Amon put the size of the opportunity in endpoints: 6 billion phones, 2 billion wearables, 2 billion PCs and 500 million connected cars that will each become a port for AI agents to act through. He framed Dragonfly as a third family alongside the consumer Snapdragon and industrial Dragonwing brands, and showed a Taiwan supply-chain backplane centered on TSMC with UMC, Vanguard, Powerchip, Winbond (2344 TT), ASE, SPIL and Win Semi among the named partners.
On the AI PC contest with NVIDIA and MediaTek, Qualcomm struck a cooperative tone. Its computing chief Kedar Kondap welcomed NVIDIA to the Windows-on-Arm camp and said the entry validates seven years of Qualcomm investment outside x86, noting Windows-on-Arm game compatibility has doubled in two years to 2,600 titles. Qualcomm is meanwhile pushing a lower-cost Snapdragon C against Apple's entry notebooks.
Amon also laid out token economics to size the agent shift: a single conversational query uses about 10,000 tokens, a reasoning task about 100,000, and an agentic task about 1 million, with global token demand he expects to grow 40x to 1.27 trillion every 10 seconds by 2030.
Linked stocks: QCOM US, NVDA US, 2454 TT
Taiwan's memory makers ride the conventional-DRAM squeeze
Taiwan's memory vendors are emerging as the unlikely winners of the AI memory cycle, with first-quarter Taiwan memory sales up 152% YoY as Samsung and SK Hynix divert capacity to HBM and leave conventional DRAM in short supply.
The Taiwan Semiconductor Industry Association reported first-quarter memory sales of NT$106.5bn, up 152.4% YoY, and projects 2026 memory sales will double to NT$461.2bn. The driver is price: with the Korean majors focused on HBM and DDR5 for AI servers, supply of older DDR4 and LPDDR4 has tightened, and TrendForce data put the 8GB DDR4 contract price near US$20 by late May, roughly 10 times its level a year ago. Nanya (2408 TT), the world's fourth-largest DRAM maker, posted April sales of NT$25.5bn, up 8.2x YoY.
The pricing move is still accelerating. TrendForce said first-quarter conventional DRAM contract prices rose 93% to 98% QoQ, lifting industry revenue 81% QoQ to a record US$97bn, and guided second-quarter contract prices up a further 58% to 63% as suppliers run inventories near empty and prioritize high-capacity RDIMM for AI servers.
The earnings leverage is showing up fast in the Taiwan names. Winbond (2344 TT) reported April profit up 216x YoY, a single month that exceeded its entire prior-year result, and Macronix (2337 TT) posted April profit up 854% YoY. One industry executive noted that with depreciation on older lines largely complete, conventional-DRAM profitability is now unusually high, enough that some Taiwan makers are delaying their shift to DDR5.
Linked stocks: 2408 TT, 2344 TT, 2337 TT, MU US
Sources: 不只韓企！AI記憶體之利台廠吃得到 Q1銷售年增152.4％, DRAM Q1產值創新高 Q2合約價估漲逾6成
先聲 First Word — Exclusives from Chinese-Language Sources
TSMC confirms Delta tie-up as Delta readies a solid-state transformer
Delta Electronics (2308 TT) president Simon Chang said demand for the company's new solid-state transformer should explode next year, replacing traditional silicon transformers and making AI data-center power adjustable and controllable to handle fluctuating loads. The disclosure came as TSMC publicly confirmed its collaboration with Delta for the first time, a signal that power delivery is now a named part of the AI build-out rather than an afterthought. (1 Jun 2026) Source: 電源一哥推祕密武器 相關需求有望在明年爆發
SK Hynix starts a Dalian NAND expansion aimed at AI storage
SK Hynix (000660 KS) has begun preparing volume production of 200-layer-class floating-gate NAND flash at its second plant in Dalian, China, and plans to add higher-density QLC technology to target enterprise SSDs for AI data centers. The move expands NAND supply specifically for AI storage, a segment pulling demand as inference workloads grow. (1 Jun 2026) Source: SK海力士傳啟動大連廠NAND擴產 採FG、QLC劍指eSSD
Samsung overtakes Micron to lead automotive memory
Samsung Electronics (005930 KS) took the top spot in the global automotive memory chip market for the first time, passing Micron (MU US) with a roughly 40% share. Rising demand for high-performance memory in autonomous driving and in-vehicle infotainment is reshaping a segment Micron had led, and points to Samsung leaning on auto as a steadier outlet alongside the AI server build-out. (1 Jun 2026) Source: 三星首度超越美光 市佔40%站上全球車用記憶體市場第一
Foxconn forms a French chip-packaging venture with Thales and Radiall
Foxconn (2317 TT), Radiall and Thales broke ground on a French joint venture, Tessalia Technology, to run advanced semiconductor packaging and test, targeting more than 50 million system-in-package units a year by 2033 on combined investment that may exceed EUR250m. The venture, formed under the Choose France 2026 banner, will license Foxconn technology and serve aerospace, telecom, automotive and medical demand, marking a second European front for Foxconn alongside its sovereign-AI server deal. (1 Jun 2026) Source: 鴻海攜法商搶攻 SiP 商機 三方合資封測廠動土
© 2026 Zero One Investment Research Pte Ltd. For informational purposes only. Not investment advice.