TSMC weighing investment in chip design startup FuriosaAI

Home > Business > Industry

TSMC weighing investment in chip design startup FuriosaAI

Published: 27 Feb. 2025, 17:02 Updated: 28 Feb. 2025, 09:33

JIN EUN-SOO
[email protected]

Audio report: written by reporters, read by AI

The TSMC logo is seen in this illustration from Feb. 16 [REUTERS/YONHAP]

Chip giant TSMC is looking to make a strategic investment in Korean chip design startup FuriosaAI.

“The investment discussions with TSMC began in the fourth quarter of last year as part of our funding round," said FuriosaAI in a statement Thursday.

"They are entirely separate from the merger and acquisition negotiations [with Meta] recently reported in the media.”

Meta reportedly in talks to acquire Korean AI chip startup FuriosaAI

The size and conditions of the investment under discussion with TSMC Global, an investment arm of the Taiwanese chip giant, have yet to be confirmed.

Earlier this month, Forbes reported that FuriosaAI was being acquired by Meta as the U.S. tech giant seeks to diversify its data center chip portfolio and challenge Nvidia's dominance. The media outlet said the deal could close as early as this month.

FuriosaAI is a fabless startup specializing in AI inference chips. Founded in 2017 by former AMD engineer June Paik, the company was seen as one of Korea's few hopes in addressing the country's AI chip design capability shortcomings.

It launched its first product, Warboy, in 2021, utilizing Samsung Electronics' 14-nanomter nodes. Its second product, RNGD — pronounced "renegade" — was unveiled in August of 2024, with plans to use TSMC's five-nanometer nodes in mass production.

Industry insiders suspect that TSMC recognized the technological advancement of RNGD when manufacturing the chip for sample production on its fabrication lines.

RNGD is known to have a similar performance to Nvidia's inference chip L40S, while consuming significantly lesser energy at 150 watts compared to the former's 350 watts.

FuriosaAI has raised $115 million to date from companies such as Naver and domestic investment firm DSC Investment.

The Korean AI chip startup is known to have had troubles attracting enough capital to mass-produce its next-generation RNGD chips.

Its operating loss amounted to 60 billion won ($41.6 million) in 2023.

To secure investment, FuriosaAI was pushing to go public on Korea's main bourse within the first half of this year, selecting Mirae Asset Securities and NH Investment & Securities as the main underwriters.

With the country's economy slow to recover, however, speculation has arisen that FuriosaAI turned to a plan B of being acquired by a bigger company.

"It is unfortunate that domestic investment hasn't reached the scale we had hoped for," said Jung Yung-bum, director of tech sales at FuriosaAI at a recent roundtable discussion held at the National Assembly.

"This isn’t the first time a company has expressed interest in acquiring us."

BY JIN EUN-SOO [[email protected]]