South Korean AI startup FuriosaAI is taking up the likes of Nvidia and AMD with its AI chips — and it does not want Meta’s assist to compete.
In keeping with a local news report from the South Korean information website Maeil Business Newspaper earlier this week, Meta started full-scale negotiations to amass FuriosaAI this yr. Meta proposed to purchase the startup for $800 million, over $250 million greater than its present market worth of $545 million. The tech big was serious about furthering its personal AI chip-making endeavors by absorbing the startup’s know-how and expertise.
The report stated that negotiations broke down as a result of the 2 events disagreed concerning the course of FuriosaAI’s enterprise after the potential acquisition. If Meta had acquired FuriosaAI, the startup’s employees would have needed to create personalized AI chips solely for Meta’s AI companies as a substitute of creating extra broadly out there AI chips to compete with Nvidia and different AI chipmakers.
FuriosaAI turned down Meta’s supply to maintain creating its personal AI chips as an impartial enterprise, per the report.
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FuriosaAI introduced its newest AI chip, RNDG (pronounced Renegade), in August 2024. The startup claimed that the chip requires solely 12.5% of the vitality of present chips, with three times better performance per watt than one of many most powerful chips available on the market — Nvidia’s H100 chips.
In an interview with Maeil Enterprise Information, FuriosaAI CEO Jun-ho Baek stated that the corporate was “assured within the success of RNDG” and plans to mass-produce the chip within the second half of the yr.
“Furiosa AI is able to change the paradigm of the AI semiconductor market with environment friendly options,” Baek instructed the outlet.
In keeping with Bloomberg, FuriosaAI is within the means of sending samples of its chips to a few dozen potential clients, together with LG AI Analysis.
Baek based FuriosaAI in April 2017 after developing products for AMD in Orlando, Florida, and Samsung Electronics in South Korea. The startup now has about 150 staff, together with 15 who’re based mostly in a Silicon Valley workplace, per Bloomberg. It developed its first AI chip, Warboy, in 2021.
Meta, in the meantime, has already introduced its intention to spend closely this yr on AI to raised compete with rivals like OpenAI and Google. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg stated in January that Meta would spend up to $65 billion in 2025 alone on AI, together with constructing knowledge facilities and including extra members to its AI workforce.
FuriosaAI is not the primary startup to reject an acquisition supply from a Large Tech firm. Cybersecurity startup Wiz turned down Google’s acquisition offer of $23 billion final summer season earlier than accepting an offer of $32 billion earlier this month.
