Monlow Park, California.
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mAccording to people familiar with the matter, ETA is talking about acquiring Korean artificial intelligence startup FurioSaai, a deal that could boost the social media giant’s custom bargaining efforts amid insufficient Nvidia chips and growing demand for alternatives.
One of the people said the deal could be completed as early as this month. Another person familiar with the matter said Mark Zuckerberg's company is one of several companies that acquired Furiosaai. A Furiosaai spokesman declined comments to “guess” and cited policy. Yuan did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The Seoul-based startup just raised funds last week when it received 2 billion won (about $1.4 million) from Crit Ventures, a South Korean founded by Jaejoon Song, former CEO of online gaming company COM2US Venture capital firm. The company's valuation was not disclosed.
Furiosaai has raised a total of about 170 billion won (about 115 million US dollars) in venture capital. Its early investors include South Korean internet giant Naver and Seoul-based DSC investment.
Founded in 2017, Furiosaai is led by June Paik, who previously worked at Samsung Electronics and AMD. As of recent public filings, Peck owns an 18.4% stake in FurioSaai.
In August, FurioSaai unveiled its RNGD chip, developed with Taiwanese custom chip maker Global Unichip Corp., “While Cutted Gpus consumes RNGD (pronounced “Renegade”) can consume up to 1,200 watts, it is designed for use. Thermal Design Powered Run FurioSaai said in a blog post about RNGD. “This makes RNGD an ideal choice for large-scale deployment of advanced generative AI models such as Llama 2 and Llama 3. “Lappa 2 and Camel 3 are large language models that are publicly available in Meta.
Furiosaai claims its RNGD chips have three times the performance per watt than NVIDIA's H100 GPU.
RNGD is an AI chip specially used for inference – the process of running AI models – and is equipped with SK Hynix's HBM3 chip. The HBM3 chip is a high-performance memory that is crucial to AI computing.
Furiosaai claims its RNGD chips have three times higher per watt performance than NVIDIA's H100 graphics processing unit, which runs high-level large language models for the first time by the end of 2022.
RNGD plans to carry out large-scale production in the second half of this year. LG's AI Research Laboratory and Saudi Arabian Petroleum expressed interest in using RNGD. In September, the oil giant signed a memorandum of understanding with Sam Altman-backed AI chipmakers Furiosaai and Cerebras Systems to “explorate collaborations in supercomputing and AI domains.”
According to Furiosaai's latest financial results, the company reported revenues rose 10 times to 3.6 billion won in 2023, while losses narrowed from 51.2 billion won to 63.7 billion won.
The potential acquisition is because Meta and other high-scoring targets such as Google Cloud and Amazon Web Services are developing their own custom chips. On Monday, Reuters reported that Openai will finalize its first custom chip design in the coming months.
This is also a few months after Furiosaai's larger domestic rival Rebellions completed its merger with SK Hynix-enabled Sapeon. The merged company, operating under the name of rebellion, was South Korea's first AI Chip Unicorn, led by CEO Sunghyun Park, who received his Ph.D. MIT's electrical engineering and computer science major, previously worked at SpaceX, Intel and Samsung.
Prior to the merger, the rebellion raised at least $225 million from investors, making it the most funded AI chip startup in South Korea. The rebellious investors include Saudi Aramco Ventures, Kako Ventures, South Korean telecom operator KT, Temasek's Pavilion Capital and Korelya Capital, founded and led by former French Minister of Digital Economy Fleur Pellerin.
Other AI-related startups at the South Korean Semiconductor Center include foundation model builders Tillillion Labs and Linq, which helps hedge funds accelerate their equity research missions.
