Did the Renegade Performance Evaluation Provide Conviction?
Significant Differences in Business Direction After Meta Acquisition
FuriosaAI, a domestic artificial intelligence (AI) semiconductor design company, has ultimately rejected Meta's acquisition offer. Instead of selling management rights overseas, it has decided to pursue independent AI chip development and mass production.
According to the semiconductor industry on the 24th, Baek Junho, CEO of FuriosaAI, announced internally on the same day that "we will not proceed with acquisition negotiations with Meta." It is also reported that the rejection was communicated to Meta.
FuriosaAI is said to have set its business direction toward independent AI chip development and mass production, including the 'Renegade.' FuriosaAI developed cost-effective neural processing units (NPUs) such as Warboy and Renegade compared to NVIDIA's AI semiconductors. Renegade is the first AI semiconductor to incorporate SK Hynix's high-bandwidth memory HBM3 and aims for full-scale mass production in the second half of this year. Renegade shows performance similar to L40S, a top-tier inference AI chip considered the next step after NVIDIA's H100, but it is more than twice as efficient with a power consumption of 150 watts (W) compared to L40S's 350 watts.
The rejection of Meta's acquisition offer is reportedly influenced by meaningful results obtained from recent performance evaluations of Renegade, leading to the judgment that independent chip development and mass production have significant benefits. FuriosaAI is currently conducting performance tests of Renegade with major companies such as LG AI Research Institute and Saudi Aramco.
Meta has been focusing on acquiring AI fabless startups to design its own chips optimized for AI model training and inference. Since October last year, Meta has been contacting AI fabless companies in the U.S., Israel, and other countries as potential merger and acquisition (M&A) targets, with FuriosaAI emerging as a prime candidate for negotiations.
However, negotiations reportedly broke down due to differences between CEO Baek and Meta regarding the business direction and organizational structure envisioned after acquiring FuriosaAI. FuriosaAI's corporate value is estimated to be around 800 billion KRW, and Meta's acquisition offer was reportedly $800 million (approximately 1.2 trillion KRW).
FuriosaAI's recent investment round, which was judged to enable stable funding, also appears to have influenced the breakdown of negotiations. FuriosaAI is expected to secure about 70 billion KRW in funds within a month, including a letter of intent (LOI) for a 30 billion KRW investment from the Korea Development Bank.
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