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NVIDIA uses a $3.5 billion investment in MediaTek to hold the position of a tollbooth for AI compute capacity, while Trump, nine weeks before the midterm election, takes the stage for data centers.
1|NVIDIA invests $3.5 billion in MediaTek to set up tollbooths on the custom-chip battlefield
NVIDIA announced subscribing to convertible bonds issued by MediaTek for $3.5 billion. The deal’s technical core is embedding the NVLink Fusion interconnect protocol and the newly released NVHBM technology into MediaTek’s data-center chip designs. MediaTek is building a custom ASIC business, and expects that business revenue will reach $2.0 billion in 2026.
The timing of this investment is worth noting. Amazon, Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, and Anthropic are all developing their own AI chips to reduce dependence on NVIDIA GPUs. NVIDIA’s response isn’t to block this trend, but to put a tollbooth in the middle of it. Forbes calls it the “tollbooth strategy”: even if customers don’t buy NVIDIA GPUs, they still can’t get around NVIDIA’s technology standards at the chip interconnect layer.

BlockBeats message: On September 1, Binance founder CZ recently attended the Bitcoin Asia 2026 event in Hong Kong and gave an exclusive interview (Hong Kong 01), looking back on his personal experiences and investment philosophy. CZ was born in rural Jiangsu. At age 12, he immigrated to Canada, worked at McDonald’s and gas stations in Vancouver, and later studied computer science at McGill University. He then worked in fintech in Tokyo and New York. By age 25, he had already led a team of about 60 people at Bloomberg, with an annual salary of 390,000 USD.
In 2005, CZ went to Shanghai to start a fintech company, but after operating for 8 years, his equity holdings became zero. In 2013, after coming into contact with Bitcoin, he sold his apartment in Shanghai and put the funds into Bitcoin. Then the price fell by about two-thirds and went sideways for around a year and a half. In 2017, CZ founded Binance and raised 15 million USD through an ICO. The platform token fell 40% on its first day of listing, but after about five months since its establishment, Binance became the cryptocurrency exchange with the highest trading volume globally.

BlockBeats message. On September 1, Binance founder CZ recently attended Bitcoin Asia 2026 in Hong Kong and gave an interview. He revealed that most of the first draft of his 374-page autobiography (Binance life) was completed in prison. At the time, he could only use a computer for 15 minutes each time, and he was unable to copy and paste, so he had to queue multiple times to write using fragmented moments.
CZ said that during his incarceration, the most torturous part was not the writing environment, but the persistent 「uncertainty」. The fine amount increased from $800 million to $4.3 billion, and the prison term was also changed from the initially expected home confinement to 4 months of imprisonment. During his time serving the sentence, the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement issued three warrants for his detention; the last one occurred when there were only 14 days left in his sentence.

BlockBeats report: On September 1, according to TechCrunch, venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) has expanded the size of its Growth Fund—i.e., the fifth growth fund—from $6.75 billion at the time it was established in January of this year to $8.5 billion, adding $1.75 billion in new capital. The fund mainly invests in growth-stage startups that are scaling products, opening up new markets, and expanding their business.
This expansion comes just days after a16z announced the completion of fundraising for its “Machine Age Fund” of $1.1 billion. The fund mainly focuses on the AI hardware sector, investing in infrastructure startups covering areas such as chips, storage, networking, and data storage.

BlockBeats news, September 1: According to a report by Bloomberg, sources familiar with the matter said that prediction market platform Polymarket plans to complete a new round of $1 billion fundraising, with a post-investment valuation of $21 billion. The round is led by venture capital firm 1789 Capital, which plans to contribute about $300 million. A Polymarket spokesperson declined to comment.
Polymarket’s valuation was set at $15 billion during its April fundraising this year, when D.E. Shaw and G Squared became new investors. Earlier this year, the parent company of the New York Stock Exchange, Intercontinental Exchange, also completed a $1.6 billion investment in Polymarket. The new funding will be used to attract more institutional users. Polymarket is currently seeking regulatory approval to offer margin trading in the U.S.

BlockBeats message: On September 1, U.S. President Trump said that U.S. GDP growth could reach 14%, 15%, 16%, or even 20%. Even if the economy achieves such rapid growth, it should not be a reason for the Federal Reserve to raise interest rates. He said, "Successful growth will not trigger inflation," and called for the U.S. to have the "lowest interest rates in the world."
U.S. July PCE price index rose 3.7% year-on-year, still above the Federal Reserve’s 2% inflation target. The market currently widely expects that the FOMC may raise rates in September. Data from the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis shows that since 1947, real U.S. GDP quarterly annualized growth has reached or exceeded 20% only once—after the end of pandemic lockdowns in the third quarter of 2020, when it rebounded to 34.9%.

BlockBeats message. September 1, according to Iran’s Press TV, a senior military commander of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, Mohammad Reza Naqdi, said that amid ongoing U.S.-Iran confrontation, Iran’s top strategy is to build maximum deterrence power rather than restart military conflict or negotiate with the enemy. Naqdi said that after about six months of the war, Iran is considering shifting to a more offensive phase of military confrontation against the United States and Israel. Naqdi also said, “What we have conducted so far is conventional warfare; we have not yet entered the phase of asymmetric warfare. Asymmetric warfare means launching war on Wall Street, in Manhattan, anywhere, at any time.”