South Korean chip designer FuriosaAI does not want to be bought

Better without Meta: South Korean chip manufacturer FuriosaAI has turned down a purchase offer from US internet company Meta. The company would prefer to remain independent and concentrate on developing its chips for artificial intelligence (AI).

Meta entered into purchase negotiations with FuriosaAI at the beginning of the year, according to the South Korean business newspaper Maeil Business Newspaper and the US news agency Bloomberg. The internet company has offered 800 million US dollars.

Differences of opinion between the partners

However, the negotiations apparently did not fail due to the purchase price. Both sides were unable to agree on the company's organizational structure and business strategy after the takeover.

Meta is investing heavily in AI: CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced in January that he would be investing 60 to 65 billion US dollars this year, the majority of which in data centers. The company plans to increase the number of its GPU accelerators to 1.3 million by the end of the year. Meta wanted to take over FuriosaAI in order to be less dependent on chips from the US company Nvidia. The group has been using its own AI accelerators for years, alongside models from Nvidia and AMD.

FuriosaAI develops AI chips

FuriosaAI has around 150 employees and was founded in 2017 by June Paik, who previously held senior positions at Samsung Electronics and AMD. The company has developed the AI chip RNGD (pronounced: Renegade), which is particularly suitable for reasoning models. It was tested together with LG AI Research, among others. LG AI Research also intends to use it in the future. They are produced by the chip manufacturer Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing (TSMC).

A series C financing round is currently underway in which the company aims to raise 70 billion kwon, the equivalent of around 44 million euros.

(wpl)