The Windows on Arm chip race heats up with a challenger to Qualcomm

Intel, Nvidia, AMD and Qualcomm are the household names in chips – but in 2025, the popular but lesser-known MediaTek could try to join them. Reuters reports that the Taiwanese chip company is now preparing an AI PC chipset to be released in late 2025 specifically for Windows PCs. Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite is currently the rumored MacBook Air talk of the town, and MediaTek wants a piece of that action.

According to Reuters, the new MediaTek chip will target the same Microsoft Copilot Plus PC program that Qualcomm helped launch with Microsoft. There’s apparently an opening for chipmakers like MediaTek now that Microsoft’s exclusive deal with Qualcomm for Arm-based versions of Windows It’s finally ending this year.

Why would Nvidia need MediaTek when it already builds its own Arm chips? (The Nintendo Switch has used Nvidia Tegra chips from the beginning.) I’m not sure. MediaTek is a fabless chipmaker, meaning it doesn’t make chips itself. As far as MediaTek’s separate chip is concerned, Reuters says it uses Arm’s “off-the-shelf designs,” likely meaning it adopts Arm’s already-designed processing cores rather than something MediaTek created on its own.

And speaking of these ready-made designs, they could also power Qualcomm’s other Windows + Arm competitor. “Arm executives said one of their customers used the off-the-shelf components to build a chip in approximately nine months for a design that is already complete, which MediaTek’s is not,” he writes. Reuters.

It looks like things are heating up again in the laptop space!