After Snubbing Meta's $800M Offer, Korean AI Chipmaker Scores First Big Win On Home Soil

Competition is breathing down the neck of artificial intelligence (AI) chip maker Nvidia (NVDA), as Seoul-based startup FuriosaAI, Inc. has secured a major customer win, four months after rejecting an $800 million buyout offer from Mark Zuckerberg-led Meta Platforms, Inc. (META).

FuriosaAI received approval for its AI chip, RNGD (pronounced "Renegade"), after LG AI Research, a unit of South Korean electronics giant LG, evaluated it for seven months based on its performance and efficiency. 

LG would utilize the company’s chips for its EXAONE large language models (LLMs), the South Korean company confirmed in a statement.

Nvidia currently enjoys a near-monopoly position in the market for AI chips, and reflecting the AI opportunity, the stock currently trades just shy of its all-time high.

On Stocktwits, retail sentiment toward Nvidia stock was neutral early Tuesday, with the message volume at ‘normal’ levels.

FuriosaAI stated that its RNGD achieves 2.25 times better LLM inference performance per watt compared to graphic processing units (GPUs). The chip also met LG‘s latency and throughput requirements.

The two companies will partner to supply RNGD servers to enterprises using EXAONE across key sectors like electronics, finance, telecommunications, and biotechnology.

Kijeong Jeon, Lead, Product Unit, LG AI Research, said, “RNGD provides a compelling combination of benefits: excellent real-world performance, a dramatic reduction in our total cost of ownership, and a surprisingly straightforward integration.”

FuriosaAI announced in April that it would bring RNGD to Microsoft’s Azure Marketplace, stating that it planned to soon provide an API for inference on RNGD using precompiled Llama models.

A Bloomberg report, citing FuriosaAI founder & CEO June Paik, said, “For the last eight years, we worked very hard from R&D to product phases and finally this commercialization phase.”

“This signals that our product is ready for enterprise adoption.”

Paik had previously worked for AMD and Samsung Electronics.

FuriosaAI was working to secure its next customers in the U.S., the Middle East, and Southeast Asia, and targets more agreements in the second half of this year, Paik reportedly said.

In late March, a separate Bloomberg report stated, citing a person who asked not to be identified, that Meta’s talks to buy FuriosaAI since the start of the year had not fructified.

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