[News] South Korea’s FuriosaAI Lands LG Deal After Turning Down Meta’s Acquisition Offer

According to a report from ijiwei, citing TechCrunch, South Korean AI chip startup FuriosaAI has secured its first major contract. As the report notes, FuriosaAI announced on Tuesday a partnership to supply its AI chip, RNGD, to LG AI Research. Ijiwei adds that LG will use the chip to power its Exaone large language model.

After completing a successful evaluation, Furiosa and LG AI Research plan to provide the RNGD Server to enterprise customers working with LLMs. This will cover various LG business sectors, including electronics, finance, telecommunications, and biotechnology, according to its press release.

FuriosaAI is one of the few South Korean chip design companies aiming to gain a foothold in the rapidly growing AI infrastructure market in the post-ChatGPT era. As ijiwei indicates, the RNGD chip was developed not only to challenge industry leader NVIDIA, but also to compete with other startups such as Groq, SambaNova Systems, and Cerebras Systems.

As highlighted in the report, FuriosaAI drew public attention in March when it declined an $800 million acquisition offer from Meta and chose to remain independent. According to ijiwei, industry sources say that FuriosaAI plans to raise additional funding ahead of a future initial public offering (IPO).

FuriosaAI was founded in 2017 by June Paik, a former employee of Samsung Electronics and AMD, with a focus on developing semiconductors for AI inference. As ijiwei indicates, the company claims its RNGD’ inference performance per watt is 2.25 times higher than that of a GPU.

Ijiwei also notes that FuriosaAI is actively working to secure new customers in the U.S., the Middle East, and Southeast Asia. As cited in the report, Paik stated that the company expects to sign similar agreements in the second half of this year.

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(Photo credit: FuriosaAI)