Instead of selling to Meta, AI chip startup FuriosaAI signed a huge customer | TechCrunch

South Korean AI chip startup FuriosaAI announced a partnership on Tuesday to supply its AI chip, RNGD, to enterprises using LG AI Research‘s recently unveiled EXAONE platform.

RNGD is optimized for running large language models (LLMs) and just last week, the Korean tech giant LG unveiled its next-generation hybrid AI model EXAONE 4.0. The collaboration targets key sectors, including electronics, finance, telecommunications, and biotechnology, for a range of diverse applications.

This news comes roughly three months after FuriosaAI declined Meta’s $800 million acquisition offer, opting to remain independent.

The deal fell through due to disagreements over post-acquisition business strategy and organizational structure, rather than price issues, according to local media outlets. Meta’s interest in acquiring AI chipmakers like FuriosaAI reflects its broader strategy to reduce its reliance on third-party suppliers, such as Nvidia.

When asked why the deal with Meta fell through, CEO of FuriosaAI June Paik told TechCrunch: “We want to continue our mission, and I think it’s an exciting opportunity at the same time. I believe it’s a very impactful contribution, both personally and for the company, to make AI computing more sustainable.”

With M&A (at least from Meta) off the table, Paik declined to specify if the startup is now in pursuit of fresh funding.

However, Paik says this new partnership will lead to business possibilities far beyond South Korea.

“LG AI’s EXAONE is regarded as the leading sovereign AI model in South Korea. It won’t be used just within LG. It will be one of the main AI models used in the Korean AI ecosystem. We expect there will be many demands for this EXAONE, as well as for our chip solutions in South Korea, but not only in Korea. The LG team is also partnering with and doing business with global customers. So, we also expect this to be used by those customers, including global customers,” Paik said.

LG AI’s decision to adopt Furiosa’s AI chip and accelerator is notable for another reason: it’s one of the few public endorsements of a rival to Nvidia by a major enterprise, Paik said. One major reason for the win is that the startup’s hardware costs less.

“We had to prove that our solution not only delivers strong performance but also lowers total cost of ownership,” Paik said.

FuriosaAI claims that its RNGD accelerator outperformed competitive GPUs with LG AI Research’s EXAONE models, delivering 2.25 times better inference performance. Paik also says that LG found the FuriosaAI hardware was more energy efficiency.

Furiosa’s chip is not a general GPU but was built exclusively for AI. “We can support a wide variety of AI models efficiently. But unlike GPUs, which are still fundamentally general-purpose processors, our architecture is natively built for AI computing. We do not develop our chip for rendering or mining,” Paik said.

The Seoul-based startup, which also operates an office in Santa Clara, has a global team of just 15 employees.