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Meta is currently in discussions to acquire South Korean AI chip startup Furiosaai. According to those familiar with the issue, the deal is boosting the social media giant’s custom chip efforts amid a shortage of NVIDIA chips and an increasing demand for alternatives.
The transaction can be completed as quickly as this month, one person said. Mark Zuckerberg’s company is one of several companies in talks to acquire Furiosaai, another familiar with the issue said. A spokesman for Furiosaai refused to comment on “speculation” by citing the policy. Meta did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
The Seoul-based startup received 2 billion wins (approximately $1.4 million) from Crit Ventures, a Korean venture capital firm founded last week by Jaejoong Song, the former CEO of online gaming company COM2US. I raised funds. The company’s ratings have not been revealed.
In total, Furiosaai raised approximately 170 billion won (approximately $115 million) in venture capital. Early investors included Naver, a major Korean internet company, and Seoul-based DSC investments.
Furiosaai was founded in 2017 and is led by June Paik, who previously worked for Samsung Electronics and AMD. At the time of its latest release, Paik owned an 18.4% stake in Furiosaai.
In August, Furiosaai announced the RNGD chip. It was developed in collaboration with Global Unichip Corp., a custom chip manufacturer in Taiwan. (TDP) is only 150 watts,” Furiosaai said in a blog post about RNGD. “This makes RNGD an ideal choice for large-scale deployment of advanced generator AI models like Llama 2 and Llama 3.” Llama 2 and Llama 3 are published by Meta’s publicly available large-scale models. This is a language model.
Furiosaai claims its RNGD chip is three times better than Nvidia’s H100 GPUs, three times better than its H100 GPUs.
RNGD is an AI chip (the process of running AI models) specializing in reasoning and is equipped with SK Hynix’s HBM3 chip. The HBM3 chip is a type of high-performance memory that is essential for AI computing.
Furiosaai claims that the RNGD chip has three times the performance per watt, and three times the performance per watt, compared to NVIDIA’s H100 graphics processing unit.
RNGD is scheduled to enter mass production later this year. LG’s AI Research Lab and Saudi Arabian Oil Co. have expressed interest in using RNGD. In September, the oil giant signed a memorandum with Sam Altman-backed AI chip makers, Furiosaai and Cerebras Systems, “exploring supercomputing and collaboration in the AI domain.”
According to Furiosaai’s latest financial results, the company reported revenues increased more than a 10-fold increase to 3.6 billion won in 2023, with losses shrinking from 51.2 billion won to 63.7 billion won.
The potential acquisitions are because other hyperschools, such as Meta, Google Cloud and Amazon Web Services, are developing their own custom chips. On Monday, Reuters reported that Openai has finalized its first custom chip design in the coming months.
It also comes just months after Furiosaai’s larger domestic rival, Rebellions, completed its merger with Sapeon, backed by SK Hynix. The total company operating under the name of the rebellion is South Korea’s first AI chip unicorn and is led by doctoral CEO Sunghyun Park. I previously worked for SpaceX, Intel and Samsung in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT.
Before the merger, the rebellion raised at least $225 million from investors, making it South Korea’s most funded AI chip startup. Insurrection investors include Saudi Aramco venture arm WA’ed Ventures, Kakao Ventures, Korean telecom operators KT, Temasek’s Pavilion Capital and Korelya Capital.
Other AI-related startups in Korea’s semiconductor hub include Foundation Model Builder Triumph Lab and LINQ.
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