(Bloomberg) — 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.
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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.
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 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.
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.
