The U.S. economic media outlet Forbes reported on the 11th local time that Meta, the parent company of Facebook, is in discussions to acquire FuriosaAI, a Korean AI chip design startup.
Forbes cited sources to report this, stating that the acquisition discussions could be concluded as early as this month.
FuriosaAI is a fabless startup, meaning it specializes in semiconductor design, and it develops AI inference specialized semiconductors for data center servers.
It was founded in 2017 by Junho Baek, a former engineer at Samsung Electronics and U.S. semiconductor company AMD.
FuriosaAI debuted its first AI semiconductor, “Warboy,” in 2021, and followed up by unveiling the next-generation AI semiconductor “Renegade” (RNGD) in August last year.
FuriosaAI is currently attracting interest from several companies, with Meta among them, according to sources.
Meta’s interest in this startup is interpreted as a move to develop its own AI chips, considering it currently spends a significant amount of money purchasing NVIDIA’s AI chips.
Meta announced plans to invest up to $65 billion, or 93 trillion won in Korean currency, this year in AI and the construction of large-scale new data centers.
FuriosaAI has raised approximately $115 million in funding so far and also secured an additional 2 billion won investment from the venture capital firm Crit Ventures earlier this month.
Naver and Korean investment company DSC Investment participated in the initial funding round, and CEO Baek is known to hold an 18.4% stake in the company.
[Photo Source: Reuters = Yonhap News]
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