"NVIDIA Challenger" FuriosaAI wins its first major client LG

South Korean artificial intelligence chip startup FuriosaAI has achieved a key commercial breakthrough in its challenge against industry giant NVIDIA, as its chips have won their first major customer, validating the feasibility and market potential of its technology.

According to media reports on the 22nd, after rejecting an $800 million acquisition offer from Meta months ago, the Seoul-based startup has received final approval from LG AI Research. Following a rigorous seven-month evaluation of performance and efficiency, LG will adopt FuriosaAI's RNGD chips to power its Exaone large language model.

This collaboration represents an important market validation for FuriosaAI. The company is one of the few chip design firms in South Korea aiming to stand out in the AI infrastructure boom. The competitive targets of its RNGD chips include not only industry leader NVIDIA but also other startups such as Groq Inc., SambaNova Systems Inc., and Cerebras Systems Inc.

FuriosaAI CEO June Paik stated:

“Over the past eight years, we have made tremendous efforts from R&D to product phase, and now to commercialization. This marks that our product is ready for enterprise-level applications.”

LG Bets on RNGD's Exaone Large Model

FuriosaAI was founded in 2017 by June Paik, who previously worked at Samsung Electronics and AMD, focusing on developing semiconductors for AI inference or services. The company claims that its chips have 2.25 times the inference performance per watt compared to graphics processors, which constitutes its core advantage in challenging the existing market landscape. Like its South Korean peers Rebellions Inc. and Semifive Inc., FuriosaAI is trying to leverage the vast semiconductor talent, suppliers, and government incentive ecosystem built around Samsung and SK Hynix over the past decade.

Under this collaboration framework, FuriosaAI will jointly deploy RNGD servers using the Exaone model with LG and plans to promote it across various industries, including electronics and finance. These servers will also provide computing power support for LG's internal enterprise AI assistant ChatExaone, which LG plans to expand to external customers in the future.

In March of this year, FuriosaAI drew public attention for rejecting Meta's acquisition offer, ultimately choosing to remain independent. Now, with its first significant customer secured, FuriosaAI is actively seeking to expand its customer base in the United States, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia. June Paik indicated that similar agreements are expected to be reached in the second half of this year. According to insiders, the company plans to conduct a new round of financing before ultimately going public (IPO)