- The South Korean startup furiosaai rejected an acquisition of $ 800 target
- The agreement collapsed on the plans after the acquisition despite the valuation of the previous market
- Furiosaai decided to stay independent and will launch his RNGD chip this year
As the demand for the infrastructure of AI continues to grow, hyperscalers such as Meta, Microsoft and Google are actively working to reduce their dependence on the NVIDIA hardware harvest through the development of their own personalized silicon. According to the reports, Meta has begun to prove its first internal the AI training chip, as part of a broader impulse to obtain more control over its AI stack.
In addition to its internal efforts, Meta has also been exploring acquisitions of promising chips manufacturers of AI to reinforce their hardware capabilities.
One of those objectives was the Korean Startup Furiosaai, which the technological giant saw as a strong candidate to help accelerate its AI infrastructure ambitions. Meta made a purchase offer worth $ 800 million (approximately 1.2 billion wones) for the company, but although the offer arrived at approximately 400 billion profits (approximately $ 300 million) above the estimated market value of Furiosaai, was rejected.
A difference of opinion
According Maeil Business NewspaperThe negotiations broke due to contradictory visions about the future of the company. Furiosaai’s leadership decided to move away from the agreement and continue to operate independently in the increasingly competitive AI semiconductor space.
“Since October of last year, Meta had been looking at several AI semiconductor companies in the United States and Israel, and finally chose Furiosaai as a solid acquisition objective and entered negotiations at the beginning of the year,” said a source familiar with the company. Maeil Business Newspaper.
“I understand that the negotiations were broken because the two parties could not reduce their differences on the direction of the business and organizational structure after the acquisition, instead of the price.”
Founded in 2017 by the CEO June Paik, Furiosaai specializes in the design of AI chips and currently uses around 140 people, more than 90 percent of which are developers, including Google, Qualcomm and Samsung engineers.
The company’s flagship product, RNGD (pronounced ‘Renegade’), presented at Hot Chips 2024, is a high -performance AI inference chip based on the 5 Nm TSMC process and equipped with dual HBM3 memory.
According to Furiosaai, it offers twice the efficiency of traditional GPUs while consume only a quarter of power, so it is easy to see the attractiveness for the finish line.
RNGD mass production is expected to begin in the second half of 2025 and Maeil Business Newspaper It informs that several important organizations, including the investigation of LG AI and Saudi Aramco, have registered to prove the performance of the chip.
Furiosaai has raised around 70 billion wones (approximately $ 52 million) in funds to support its production of chips and operational costs.
