Ming-Chi Kuo, an analyst at Tianfeng International Securities, recently released the latest long article analysis, in-depth discussion of the medium- and long-term strategic significance of OpenAI and MediaTek’s cooperation in developing AI mobile phones for MediaTek. Ming-Chi Kuo pointed out clearly at the outset: “OpenAI cooperates with MediaTek on AI mobile phones. Regardless of whether this product is successful or not, it is of great significance to MediaTek’s mobile phone business.” He believes that this cooperation alone will help MediaTek strengthen its brand value, master AI agent mobile phone SoC development capabilities and enhance its 6G voice. At the same time, it will re-evaluate (re-rating) the mobile phone business, which will be beneficial to the mid- to long-term trend of stock prices.
Brand Value: A rare opportunity for global exposure in decades
Ming-Chi Kuo pointed out that Qualcomm (Qualcomm) continues to maintain a market share of up to 60% in the high-end Android mobile phone SoC market. In recent years, it has become more active in sponsoring F1 (Mercedes, Ferrari) and serving as a jersey sponsor for Manchester United. These high-intensity brand marketing have made the average brand premium of Qualcomm mobile phone SoC about 30-40% higher than that of MediaTek.
However, the cooperation with OpenAI mobile phones may become a key opportunity for MediaTek to reverse this disadvantage. According to Kantar BrandZ rankings, ChatGPT is the brand with the fastest growing annual brand value in 2026, with an annual growth rate of 285%. Coupled with the fact that AI agent mobile phones have gradually become synonymous with high-end mobile phones, the market attention of OpenAI mobile phones will be extremely amazing.
Ming-Chi Kuo estimates that based on ChatGPT’s weekly active users (WAU) of approximately 900 million, and after estimating daily active users (DAU), and then including the diffusion effect of media reports and social communication, the potential number of people reached by the OpenAI mobile phone conference will reach 3 to 500 million, approximately equivalent to the viewing scale of a single game of major global sports events. He emphasized that this pairing of MediaTek will be an extremely rare brand exposure event in the past few decades.
What’s more critical is the strategic significance of the U.S. market. Ming-Chi Kuo quoted Pew Research Center data and pointed out that about 80% of people in the United States have heard of ChatGPT, and ChatGPT is the only AI chatbot that more than half of American teenagers have used. The United States is the most important high-end mobile phone market in the world, and MediaTek will not start to see phones equipped with its high-end SoC enter the market until 2024 (GSMArena). The cooperation with OpenAI will help accelerate MediaTek’s brand recognition in the minds of American end users.
AI agent SoC development capabilities and 6G voice
Ming-Chi Kuo’s second core argument focuses on the fundamental changes brought by AI agent mobile phones to SoC design, and how MediaTek can use this to gain a say in the formulation of 6G standards.
He noted that AI agents have very different requirements for SoCs than in the past. When the agentic workload continues, the context state will continue to expand during multiple rounds of inference, tool calls, and memory updates, increasing the pressure on LPDDR bandwidth, transmission, and power consumption of the KV cache. This pressure comes from the long-term, normalized, and low-latency operating characteristics of the agentic workload, so the continuous inferencePower management, memory efficiency and heterogeneous computing scheduling, will become the focus of optimization.
In addition, AI agent mobile phones emphasize always-on environmental perception capabilities, and the ISP design also needs to shift from “pressing the shutter to operate at high load” to “considering real-time perception and high-quality processing under continuous low-power operation.” Ming-Chi Kuo emphasized that there are currently no products on the market with a complete AI agent device experience, and processor manufacturers can only design based on assumptions and simulations. After MediaTek accumulates practical experience through this case, in the future, it will be able to use agentic workload data that is closer to real situations as the basis for SoC design.
6G is another key battle situation. Ming-Chi Kuo analyzed that 6G is generally regarded as the native AI network. On the basis of higher bandwidth, it is required to natively support the connection requirements of a large number of AI agent devices: permanent connections, ultra-low latency, collaborative reasoning between devices and the cloud, etc. Mastering the actual network behavior data of AI agent devices will help increase the influence of formulating 6G network specifications.
He cited MediaTek’s past experience in formulating 5G specifications as an example: MediaTek led Qualcomm by about 2 years in proposing the IoT-NTN direction and became a key promoter of this standardization. MediaTek completed the world’s first IoT-NTN connection test in 2020 and promoted 3GPP to accelerate standardization in 2021. Ming-Chi Kuo believes that MediaTek can make specific suggestions to 3GPP based on the agentic workload measurement data accumulated by developing OpenAI mobile phones: such as agent-aware modem wake-up mechanism, memory sharing bandwidth specifications between modem and NPU, AI agent exclusive QoS class definition, etc. If the standard is formulated in a direction that MediaTek is familiar with, it will help the company gain a first-mover advantage when it comes to mass production of 6G SoCs.
Re-evaluation of the mobile phone business is favorable for the medium and long-term stock price trend
At the capital market level, Guo Mingchi put forward two levels of discussion. He pointed out that MediaTek’s recent stock price rise was mainly driven by Google TPU orders and improved revenue visibility of the AI ASIC business in 2027-2028. Although OpenAI mobile phone orders may not constitute a short-term stock price catalyst, they are still of great significance to mid- to long-term valuation.
First, in the context that the trend of AI agents and AI devices has been widely recognized by the market, the clear and high-profile OpenAI mobile phone orders will help buffer the drag of the weak mobile phone business from both market sentiment (sentiment) and fundamentals, which is equivalent to boosting the stock price.Lower support（downside support）。
Second, MediaTek’s mobile phone business is expected to resume growth momentum in 2028, and may once again become one of the key drivers of stock prices. Ming-Chi Kuo recalled that before the rise of the AI ASIC business, the valuations of Qualcomm and MediaTek were mainly based on the performance of the mobile phone business: Qualcomm’s price-to-earnings ratio (P/E) was about 28-30 times, and MediaTek’s was about 20-22 times. When the mobile phone business returns to the core of valuation again, MediaTek is expected to rely on the differentiated advantages established by the OpenAI cooperation to narrow the price-to-earnings ratio gap between the mobile phone business and Qualcomm.
— 郭明錤｜Ming-Chi Kuo (@mingchikuo) May 20, 2026
Specification rumors and mass production schedule review
According to a series of previous analyzes by Ming-Chi Kuo, OpenAI’s first AI agent phone has been rumored to be equipped with MediaTek’s customized 2 nm Dimensity 9600 The processor is equipped with LPDDR6 memory and UFS 5.0 storage specifications. Luxshare Precision serves as the system design and manufacturing partner.
In terms of mass production schedule, Ming-Chi Kuo has previously revealed that OpenAI is accelerating the project, with the goal being advanced from the original 2028 to First half of 2027mass production, and has set an aggressive goal of shipping 30 million units in 2028. OpenAI is also working with Qualcomm to develop another solution, forming a dual-vendor strategy, but MediaTek is considered the main exclusive SoC supplier.
Summarize
Ming-Chi Kuo’s in-depth analysis this time has upgraded from a simple supply chain forecast to a comprehensive strategic assessment, providing the market with a new perspective on understanding the OpenAI mobile phone cooperation case. For MediaTek, this is not just as simple as obtaining an order, it also carries the triple strategic significance of brand upgrade, technological leap and capital market re-evaluation. If OpenAI mobile phones are mass-produced in 2027 as scheduled, MediaTek will have the opportunity to write the most important transformation chapter since its establishment in the wave of AI in the semiconductor industry.
Source: KOCPC Chinese