Artificial intelligence (AI) has undoubtedly become the main theme of industrial development in recent years and for years to come. The rapid development of AI technology has led to a continuous and rapid doubling of the computing power and electricity required, and the global semiconductor and technology supply chains are undergoing new technological and structural changes to keep pace with the demands of AI.

MediaTek General Manager Chen Kuan-chou stated that when AI first appeared in people's lives, its "intelligence" was mostly limited to simple tasks such as voice recognition. However, with the continuous development of AI technology, AI has progressed to generative AI, then to the currently "booming" agentic AI, and the soon-to-be-widespread physical AI. This development path shows that AI computing is moving from training to inference and is gradually becoming more and more common in people's lives, representing a significant change taking place in the AI industry.

Furthermore, the demand for AI inference is no longer limited to cloud data centers as before, but is rapidly growing on various devices, including smartphones, self-driving cars, robots, and more, leading to the booming development of edge AI. This has also given rise to new challenges—the rapidly increasing demand for computing power and energy from AI data centers. Chen Guanzhou believes that the development trend of AI is prompting the global supply chain to continue investing in higher-level and innovative technologies to meet AI's demand for computing power and energy; on the other hand, the semiconductor industry chain is also being "pushed" by AI, including the integration of advanced process and packaging technologies, and the continued investment of related companies to meet the demand for larger-scale high-end production capacity.

Even so, the limited capacity of the current supply chain is an undeniable fact, which has led to a supply-demand imbalance due to the rapidly increasing demand for AI computing power. For example, the supply chain prioritizes allocating capacity to products with higher profitability, resulting in longer product delivery times and relatively limited room for additional orders. The recent rise in memory prices is a case in point.

Chen Guan-zhou pointed out that in the rapidly changing AI wave, MediaTek has seen the changes in the global industry chain, actively developed next-generation technologies with industry partners, and closely monitored market dynamics and accurately predicted market demand in order to plan production capacity in advance and reduce the impact of supply and demand imbalances in the semiconductor supply chain. It is also actively investing in next-generation cloud technologies and making efficient AI computing and network connectivity more widespread on devices.

At the recently concluded Mobile World Congress (MWC), MediaTek unveiled a series of cutting-edge AI and connectivity technologies and products. These included technological breakthroughs in 6G communication, a 5G-Advanced CPE platform equipped with Wi-Fi 8, edge AI applications in smartphones and IoT devices, automotive communications, and next-generation data center technologies. These showcased how the company leverages advanced chips and AI technology to bring cutting-edge AI applications to various products at the cloud and edge. This AI-driven strategy not only allows MediaTek to continue delivering impressive results but also creates more opportunities for future growth.