Taiwan’s TSMC is reportedly considering investing in the domestic AI chip design startup Furiosa. Furiosa is also in acquisition talks with the US company Meta.
According to the IT industry on the 27th, TSMC Global, a subsidiary of TSMC, has been reviewing a strategic investment in FuriosaAI since the fourth quarter of last year. However, FuriosaAI stated that the investment’s size and specific conditions have not been finalized.
FuriosaAI, a fabless startup that develops AI inference specialized semiconductors for data center servers, has developed the NPU Warboy and Renegade, which reduce costs compared to NVIDIA’s AI semiconductors.
Renegade is considered the top inference AI chip following NVIDIA’s H100 and offers similar performance to the L40S, but with a power consumption of 150W, making it more than twice as efficient as the L40S’s 350W.
Renegade is produced using TSMC’s 5nm process. TSMC’s strategic investment consideration is analyzed as recognition of FuriosaAI’s technological capabilities through TSMC’s production process.
Meta is working on developing customized semiconductors optimized for its in-house LLM performance to reduce reliance on high-cost NVIDIA chips and is in acquisition negotiations with FuriosaAI. The outcome is expected by next month.
If Meta’s acquisition of FuriosaAI and TSMC’s investment are finalized, some anticipate this could diversify the currently NVIDIA-dominated AI semiconductor market.
There is an interpretation that if FuriosaAI and TSMC move beyond just a manufacturing partnership, TSMC could increase its market share and diversify its clientele in the AI ecosystem dominated by NVIDIA.
Taiwanese market research firm TrendForce commented that “if Meta acquires FuriosaAI, it could create opportunities for TSMC,” adding that “Meta aims to strengthen its fabless capabilities to reduce reliance on NVIDIA, potentially expanding TSMC’s customer base.”
If TSMC accelerates its move away from NVIDIA, it could also impact the domestic semiconductor industry, including Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix.
However, a domestic AI industry insider commented, “It’s too early to interpret the alliance of the three companies before the scale of TSMC’s investment in FuriosaAI is clearly revealed.”