Taiwan's semiconductor strength runs well beyond TSMC's wafer foundries. New research from TrendForce ranking the world's ten largest fabless chip design companies shows Nvidia firmly in first place, with Taiwan's MediaTek holding steady at fifth, as the company projects its data center revenue will top US$2 billion this year and raises its addressable ASIC market forecast to US$80 billion by 2028.
TrendForce found that combined revenue among the top ten fabless IC design companies jumped 73 percent year over year in the second quarter of 2026, surpassing US$141.45 billion, as demand for GPUs, CPUs, ASICs and interconnect products all climbed alongside the broader expansion of AI applications.
Nvidia Extends Its Lead With Revenue Up 99 Percent
Nvidia's second-quarter revenue rose 99 percent year over year to nearly US$91.16 billion, according to the report, pushing its share of the top ten's combined revenue up to 64 percent. Beyond its usual hyperscale cloud customers, TrendForce said Neo Cloud providers, sovereign AI initiatives and enterprise clients all made significant contributions to that growth.
TrendForce noted that Nvidia has been expanding into the ASIC market by growing its NVLink Fusion ecosystem, including an investment in MediaTek aimed at helping custom XPU clients interoperate more easily with Nvidia's existing infrastructure while laying groundwork in automotive AI. Nvidia had previously taken a similar approach with an investment in Marvell that folded NVLink Fusion into that partnership as well.
Broadcom And AMD Round Out The Top Three
Broadcom took second place, with second-quarter revenue jumping 112 percent year over year to more than US$18.89 billion. TrendForce attributed the surge to the start of shipments for OpenAI's first in-house ASIC and Google's TPU 8i this quarter, alongside fast-growing networking revenue tied to XPU deployments. The report said six custom chip clients, including Anthropic and OpenAI among other frontier model developers, would keep driving Broadcom's XPU demand going forward.
AMD held onto third place, with second-quarter revenue topping US$11.53 billion as the rise of agentic AI renewed the strategic importance of CPUs. The company's data center CPU revenue has set a new high for five consecutive quarters, according to TrendForce, as AMD continues taking x86 server market share away from Intel.
Qualcomm Slips As MediaTek Holds Steady At Fifth
Qualcomm dropped to fourth place, with revenue of more than US$8.5 billion, as its smartphone chip business remained sluggish and its share of modem chips in the latest iPhone lineup declined. Its automotive segment offset some of that weakness, posting double-digit year-over-year growth for 23 consecutive quarters, and the company has also moved back into the data center business as it diversifies its QCT division.
MediaTek's revenue, also weighed down by softer smartphone demand, came in at roughly US$4.81 billion, good enough to hold fifth place. But TrendForce highlighted the company's upgraded outlook for its AI ASIC business as the more important signal, with data center revenue expected to exceed US$2 billion in 2026 and MediaTek's addressable ASIC market forecast raised to US$80 billion by 2028.
Rounding out sixth place, Marvell's revenue climbed to US$2.63 billion on surging interconnect demand, powered by its industry-leading PAM4 DSP chips, strong demand for 800G DSPs and fast-ramping 1.6T DSP shipments. TrendForce said Marvell's custom chip agreement with Google is expected to make a significant financial contribution starting in fiscal year 2029.
Why MediaTek Is Betting Big On AI Chips
Taken together, the rankings underscore how deeply AI demand is reshaping the fabless chip industry beyond just Nvidia's GPUs, pulling CPU makers, custom ASIC designers and interconnect specialists alike into the same growth cycle, and giving MediaTek, alongside Taiwan's broader chip ecosystem, a growing stake in that shift through partnerships like its expanding tie-up with Nvidia.
