FuriosaAI Rejects Meta's $800 Million Acquisition Offer, Aims for Independent Growth in AI Chip Market

AI chip startup FuriosaAI reportedly turns down $800M acquisition offer from Meta | TechCrunch

FuriosaAI, a South Korean startup that makes chips for AI applications, has rejected an $800 million acquisition offer from Meta, opting instead to focus on developing and producing its AI chips, according to a local media report. Disagreements over post-acquisition business strategy and organizational structure, rather than price issues, caused the negotiations to break down, the report said. Along with other tech companies building large language models (LLMs) for various AI applications, Meta has been trying to reduce its reliance on Nvidia for chips that are specialized for training and building LLMs. The tech giant last year unveiled its custom AI chips, and in January said it would invest up to $65 billion this year to support its AI initiatives. FuriosaAI did not respond to a request for comment. Meta did not immediately respond to a request for comment outside regular business hours. Meanwhile, FuriosaAI is reportedly in talks with investors to raise approximately $48 million (KRW 70 billion), and aims to complete the fundraise this month. Founded in 2017 by June Paik, who previously worked at Samsung Electronics and AMD, FuriosaAI has developed two AI chips, called Warboy and Renegade (RNGD), to take on the likes of Nvidia and AMD. The startup has said it has completed testing the RNGD chips, which are said to be best suited for reasoning models, in partnership with LG AI Research and Aramco. LG AI Research reportedly plans to use RNGD chips in its AI infrastructure, and the startup plans to launch the chips later this year.

AI Chip Startup FuriosaAI Rejects Meta's $800 Million Offer

Korean chip startup FuriosaAI has turned down an $800 million takeover offer from Meta Platforms Inc., choosing instead to grow the business as an independent company, a person with knowledge of the matter said. Meta had been in discussions about acquiring Seoul-based FuriosaAI since the start of this year, said the person, who asked not to be identified as the matter is private. A representative for FuriosaAI declined to comment. Meta officials couldn't immediately be reached for comment outside regular business hours on Sunday.

FuriosaAI Rejects $800 Million Acquisition Offer from Meta, Reports

Earlier this year, it was also reported that OpenAI is also building its custom chips. Seoul-based AI chip startup FuriosaAI has turned down an $800 million takeover bid from Meta, according to details from a local daily. The negotiations between the two companies fell apart over disagreements around post-acquisition strategy and organisational structure, not the price. Founded in 2017, FuriosaAI developed RNGD, an AI chip optimised for Llama 2 and Llama 3. The chip is said to consume less power than NVIDIA's H100 GPUs. FuriosaAI has raised $115 million from investors, including Naver and DSC Investment. CEO June Paik, formerly of Samsung and AMD, holds an 18.4% stake. This acquisition intended to reduce Meta's reliance on NVIDIA for AI chips. Last year, the tech giant introduced its custom chips and announced plans to spend up to $65 billion on AI initiatives in 2025. Earlier this year, it was reported that OpenAI is also building its custom chips. The company plans to finalise the design soon and send it to TSMC for production, with mass production expected in 2026. A team of 40 engineers, led by former Google employee Richard Ho, is developing the chip in partnership with Broadcom. The chip will be used to train AI models and improve over time. Tech giants Microsoft and Meta have faced challenges in producing AI chips. OpenAI's move aligns with industry efforts to reduce dependence on NVIDIA, which controls 80% of the AI chip market. Microsoft and Meta plan to invest $80 billion and $60 billion in AI infrastructure next year, respectively. The chip will use 3-nm technology with features similar to NVIDIA's, including fast memory and networking.

An Nvidia Competitor Just Turned Down Meta's $800 Million Offer to Buy It. Here's Why.

FuriosaAI has developed an AI chip that it intends to mass-produce later this year. South Korean AI startup FuriosaAI is taking on the likes of Nvidia and AMD with its AI chips -- and it doesn't need Meta's help to compete. According to a local news report from the South Korean news site Maeil Business Newspaper earlier this week, Meta began full-scale negotiations to acquire FuriosaAI this year. Meta proposed to buy the startup for $800 million, over $250 million more than its current market value of $545 million. The tech giant was interested in furthering its own AI chip-making endeavors by absorbing the startup's technology and talent. The report said that negotiations broke down because the two parties disagreed about the direction of FuriosaAI's business after the possible acquisition. If Meta had acquired FuriosaAI, the startup's staff would have had to create customized AI chips solely for Meta's AI services instead of developing more broadly available AI chips to compete with Nvidia and other AI chipmakers. FuriosaAI turned down Meta's offer to keep developing its own AI chips as an independent business, per the report. Related: Meta Is Building AI That Can Write Code Like a Mid-Level Engineer, According to Mark Zuckerberg FuriosaAI announced its latest AI chip, RNDG (pronounced Renegade), in August 2024. The startup claimed that the chip requires only 12.5% of the energy of existing chips, with three times better performance per watt than one of the most powerful chips on the market -- Nvidia's H100 chips. In an interview with Maeil Business News, FuriosaAI CEO Jun-ho Baek said that the company was "confident in the success of RNDG" and plans to mass-produce the chip in the second half of the year. "Furiosa AI is ready to change the paradigm of the AI semiconductor market with efficient solutions," Baek told the outlet. According to Bloomberg, FuriosaAI is in the process of sending samples of its chips to about a dozen potential customers, including LG AI Research. Related: DeepSeek AI Cost Less Than $6 Million to Develop. Here's Why Meta and Microsoft Are Justifying Spending Billions. Baek founded FuriosaAI in April 2017 after developing products for AMD in Orlando, Florida, and Samsung Electronics in South Korea. The startup now has about 150 employees, including 15 who are based in a Silicon Valley office, per Bloomberg. It developed its first AI chip, Warboy, in 2021. Meta, meanwhile, has already announced its intention to spend heavily this year on AI to better compete with rivals like OpenAI and Google. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in January that Meta would spend up to $65 billion in 2025 alone on AI, including building data centers and adding more members to its AI workforce. FuriosaAI isn't the first startup to reject an acquisition offer from a Big Tech company. Cybersecurity startup Wiz turned down Google's acquisition offer of $23 billion last summer before accepting an offer of $32 billion earlier this month.

AI chip startup FuriosaAI rejects Meta's $800 million offer

Korean chip startup FuriosaAI turned down an $800 million acquisition offer from Meta, opting to remain independent. The company, led by June Paik, develops AI inference semiconductors and is set to close a successful Series C funding round. FuriosaAI's latest chip, RNGD, competes with industry leaders like Nvidia.Korean chip startup FuriosaAI has turned down an $800 million takeover offer from Meta Platforms Inc., choosing instead to grow the business as an independent company, a person with knowledge of the matter said. Meta had been in discussions about acquiring Seoul-based FuriosaAI since the start of this year, said the person, who asked not to be identified as the matter is private. A representative for FuriosaAI declined to comment. Meta officials couldn't immediately be reached for comment outside regular business hours on Sunday. FuriosaAI is one of only a handful of Asian startups that have attracted Meta. Led by June Paik, who previously worked at Samsung Electronics Co. and Advanced Micro Devices Inc., it develops semiconductors for AI inferencing, or services. The eight-year-old company's second-generation processor, RNGD (pronounced "Renegade"), is designed to challenge products from industry leader Nvidia Corp. as well as fellow startups Groq Inc., SambaNova Systems Inc. and Cerebras Systems Inc. Shares in South Korea-based venture capital firm DSC Investment Inc., a big backer of the startup's, plunged more than 16% Monday. The stock had climbed sharply since news of a potential Meta takeover surfaced in February. Meta is investing heavily in artificial intelligence infrastructure, seeking to better compete in a fast-moving race against the likes of OpenAI and Google as well as upstarts such as Hangzhou-based DeepSeek. In mid-January, chief executive officer Mark Zuckerberg said that Meta would spend as much as $65 billion this year, including outlays to build a large data center and expand its AI workforce. Only a week later, Zuckerberg told investors that Meta anticipates eventually spending hundreds of billions of dollars on AI infrastructure. The Menlo Park, California-based company is also working on its own chips designed for its own AI workloads, including powering the ranking and recommendations ads on Facebook and Instagram. In 2023, it introduced its first custom AI inference chips -- and it unveiled an upgraded version last year. FuriosaAI plans to raise capital before eventually pursuing an initial public offering, according to people familiar with the matter. It's expected to close an extended Series C funding round in about a month, which is on track to exceed the targeted amount, they said. The startup, which has about 150 employees, including 15 in its Silicon Valley office, is currently providing samples of its chips to customers including LG AI Research, the AI arm of the LG Group, and Saudi Aramco, the people said. They are part of a broader pipeline of about a dozen customers engaged in sampling during the first half of this year, they said. Its latest chip, RNGD, is built on Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co.'s 5-nanometer process and uses HBM3 memory chips supplied by SK Hynix Inc.

FuriosaAI rejects Meta's $800 mil. takeover offer

FuriosaAI's RNGD artificial intelligence accelerator / Courtesy of FuriosaAI FuriosaAI, a Korean artificial intelligence (AI) chip startup, has turned down an $800 million takeover offer from U.S. tech giant Meta Platforms, industry sources said Monday. Baek Joon-ho, chief executive officer (CEO) of FuriosaAI, informed its employees that the company has decided not to proceed with takeover negotiations with Meta, according to the sources. He also notified the U.S. company of its decision. The move came as FuriosaAI has decided to continue the company's independent development and production of AI chips, the sources said. Founded in 2017, FuriosaAI is a fabless semiconductor company specializing in AI inference chips for data centers. Its flagship product, the RNGD processor, launched last year, is a new AI inference chip designed for high-performance data centers and capable of efficiently handling large language models (LLMs). In February, news outlets reported that Meta was in talks to acquire FuriosaAI as part of its efforts to expand its in-house AI chip capabilities and reduce its reliance on AI chipmaker Nvidia (Yonhap)

FuriosaAI Turns Down Meta's $800M Offer Following Breakthroughs in LLaMA 3.1 and AI Inference

Furiosa AI will continue developing its AI chips independently. | Credit: Cooper Neill / Getty Images. Amid huge investment in AI infrastructure, Big Tech firms like Meta are increasingly interested in developing their own hardware. However, the Facebook owner's latest attempt to gain a foothold in the AI chip space was struck down after FuriosaAI turned down an $800 million acquisition offer. FuriosaAI Rejects Meta Takeover Attempt Founded in 2017, Seoul-based FuriosaAI is among a crop of new startups developing AI inference solutions that could reduce data centers' reliance on Nvidia chips. Amid surging demand for AI compute, the company became an acquisition target for Meta, which reportedly bid $800 million for Furiosa. However, according to several media reports, Furiosa rejected the offer and will instead continue to grow its business independently. Meta's AI Hardware Ambitions With its growing cloud business and ambitious AI plans, securing a hardware advantage is strategically important for Meta. Following in the footsteps of the Big Three cloud giants, the company has even started to develop its own AI chip . But such initiatives inevitably take time and acquiring a hot chip startup like Furiosa would give Meta a major boost. GPU Alternatives To date, the AI infrastructure race has mostly been characterized by battles over who can build the biggest GPU cluster. But as AI adoption increases demand for inference, other factors are coming into play. Like similar solutions from Groq and Cerebras, Furiosa's chips are positioned as a faster and more efficient alternative to GPUs. For example, the company claims its RNGD platform offers "unmatched performance," when running Meta's LLaMA 3.1-8B model, achieving a throughput of 3,200-3,300 tokens per second while using just 181 watts of power per card.