Meta is reportedly in talks to acquire a South Korean chip firm as the social media giant looks to bolster its AI hardware infrastructure.
Meta may announce its intent to purchase FuriosaAI, a chip startup founded by former Samsung and AMD employees, as soon as this month, per Forbes. FuriosaAI develops chips that speed up the running and serving of AI models, including text-generating models like Meta’s Llama 2 and Llama 3.
To date, FuriosaAI has raised 90 billion Korean won (around $61.94 million) from investors, including South Korean tech company Naver, according to Crunchbase. The company has previously said it is engaged with unnamed potential customers in the U.S., Japan, and India.
Meta’s move is likely an effort to reduce its reliance on dominant chipmaker Nvidia and a complement to Meta’s in-house attempts to build efficient AI accelerator chips. Meta recently said that it expects to spend up to $65 billion this year to power its AI goals.
