Meta reportedly in talks to acquire Korean AI chip startup FuriosaAI

Meta is reportedly in discussions to acquire Korean AI chip startup FuriosaAI in a bid to temper its reliance on Nvidia's chips.

A logo of U.S. company Meta is displayed during the Vivatech technology startups and innovation fair at the Porte de Versailles exhibition center in Paris on May 22, 2024. [AFP/YONHAP]

Meta is reportedly in discussions to acquire Korean AI chip startup FuriosaAI in a move to advance the development of custom AI chips for the social media giant, which continues to spend heavily on Nvidia's chips to enhance its AI capabilities.

The acquisition talks could be concluded as early as this month, according to Forbes.

"FuriosaAI is reviewing various forms of strategic partnerships, but no decision has been reached as of yet," the company's spokesperson said in a statement following reports by Forbes and others on the deal.

FuriosaAI is a fabless semiconductor startup specializing in AI inference chips for data center servers. The company was founded in 2017 by June Paik, a former engineer at Samsung Electronics and AMD.

FuriosaAI debuted its first AI chip, Warboy, in 2021 and followed it up in August last year with the release of its next AI chip, Renegade.

The deal in the works stems from Meta’s efforts to develop proprietary AI chips. The operator behind Facebook and Instagram is spending billions of dollars on Nvidia chips. CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in early 2024 that Meta’s computing infrastructure will include 350,000 H100 chips from Nvidia by the end of the year.

The platform giant is also working with Broadcom to develop a family of proprietary AI chips, known as the Meta Training and Inference Accelerator, to optimize performance and cut AI costs.

Meta plans to spend as much as $65 billion on AI this year to develop related technologies and build new data centers in the ongoing AI race among global Big Tech.

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

Meta’s dealmaking is also reportedly to be affected by the entry of China’s AI startup DeepSeek, which released AI models as competitive as OpenAI’s ChatGPT with less-advanced processors at a cheaper cost.

BY LEE JAE-LIM [lee.jaelim@joongang.co.kr]