Korean chip startup FuriosaAI has rejected an $800 million takeover offer from Meta Platforms (NASDAQ:META), Bloomberg reported, citing a person with knowledge of the matter.
Meta had been in discussions about acquiring Seoul-based FuriosaAI since the start of this year, the report said.
FuriosaAI, led by June Paik, who formerly worked at Samsung Electronics Co. and Advanced Micro Devices, develops semiconductors for AI inferencing, or services.
The eight-year-old company plans to raise capital before eventually pursuing an initial public offering, the report said.
Its latest chip, RNGD (pronounced “Renegade”), is built on Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing’s (TSM) 5-nanometer process and uses HBM3 memory chips supplied by SK Hynix. RNGD is reportedly designed to challenge products from industry leader Nvidia (NVDA) as well as fellow startups Groq, SambaNova Systems and Cerebras Systems Inc.
Meta’s (NASDAQ:META) Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg has 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, and in 2023, introduced its first custom AI inference chips — and it unveiled an upgraded version last year.
The development comes amid fierce competition in the artificial intelligence space from the likes of Microsoft (MSFT)-backed OpenAI, Alphabet (GOOG), and Amazon (AMZN)-backed Anthropic, as well as upstarts such as Hangzhou-based DeepSeek (DEEPSEEK).
Source: https://seekingalpha.com/
