South Korean startup FuriosaAI, which produces RNGD chips for artificial intelligence, will supply its products to companies using LG AI Research's EXAONE AI platform.
Earlier this year, Meta was reported to be acquiring FuriosaAI for $800 million to reduce its reliance on NVIDIA, a leader in AI accelerators. However, in March, it was reported that the South Korean startup had pulled out of the deal due to differences over business strategy.
This allowed FuriosaAI to continue its partnership with LG AI Research, which now results in the use of RNGD (Renegade) accelerators to power LG AI EXAONE 4.0 models. The startup’s accelerators successfully passed all performance tests.
"After extensively testing a wide range of options, we found RNGD to be a highly effective solution for deploying EXAONE models. RNGD provides a compelling combination of benefits: excellent real-world performance, a dramatic reduction in our total cost of ownership, and a surprisingly straightforward integration," said Ki-jeong Jeong, head of product division at LG AI Research. "For a project of this scale and ambition, the entire process was quite impressive."
RNGD AI accelerators use a unique tensor compression processor (TCP) architecture to deliver up to 512 TFLOPS of performance with a thermal design power (TDP) of 180 W. FuriosaAI servers combine six accelerators in a single air-cooled chassis, and up to five such systems can be deployed in a single standard grid.
In a comment to TechCrunch, FuriosaAI CEO Jun Paik said that this collaboration will open up opportunities for the startup to seek new partners outside of South Korea.
"LG AI’s EXAONE is regarded as the leading sovereign AI model in South Korea. It won’t be used just within LG. It will be one of the main AI models used in the Korean AI ecosystem. We expect there will be many demands for this EXAONE, as well as for our chip solutions in South Korea, but not only in Korea. The LG team is also partnering with and doing business with global customers. So, we also expect this to be used by those customers, including global customers," said Paik.
In addition, Pike notes that this collaboration with LG AI is important for another reason - it is one of the few large public companies that has turned to NVIDIA, the undisputed market leader, for AI accelerators. The startup's CEO says that one of the main reasons is the lower cost of FuriosaAI hardware.