The 2026 smartphone market has been decidedly lackluster. In its latest forecast in August, IDC trimmed its projection for global smartphone shipments in 2026 to just over 1 billion units, a 16.7% year-on-year decline — the steepest annual drop the research firm has ever recorded.
Yet MediaTek, a leading supplier of smartphone chips, bucked the trend with record-breaking revenue in the third quarter.
MediaTek's September 2026 results show revenue of NT$55.399 billion for the month, down 13.69% from August but up 1.97% year-on-year. Third-quarter consolidated revenue came in at NT$168.057 billion (about RMB 35.26 billion), up 10.43% quarter-on-quarter and 18.27% year-on-year — a record for any single quarter.
The gains were fueled by rising average selling prices across handsets and stronger-than-expected demand for entry-level models. At the same time, MediaTek has been pushing into the data center market, working closely with major U.S. cloud providers. Its first data center AI accelerator ASIC is slated to enter mass production in the fourth quarter of 2026, and data center revenue is expected to top US$2 billion for the year.
By next year, MediaTek is poised to become one of the leading suppliers of data center ASICs.