Korean AI Chip Startup FuriosaAI Quadruples Valuation to $2.9 Billion
Korean AI chip startup FuriosaAI has completed a $620 million Series D funding round, quadrupling its valuation to $2.9 billion. The round included investments from Infinitum Partners, the Korea Growth Fund, and other international and domestic institutions. This substantial funding highlights the growing investor demand for energy-efficient alternatives to Nvidia's dominant hardware, specifically targeting AI inference. As global AI electricity consumption climbs, reducing inference costs and power usage has become a central industry battleground. FuriosaAI began mass-producing its second-generation RNGD chip this January, partnering with TSMC to manufacture 20,000 accelerators this year and targeting over 40,000 units by 2027. The company is also collaborating with Broadcom to develop third-generation AI accelerators for large-scale data centers.
## BACKGROUND
AI inference is the phase where a trained machine learning model makes predictions or generates responses based on new data, consuming massive amounts of power in data centers. Neural Processing Units (NPUs) like FuriosaAI's RNGD are specialized hardware architectures designed to execute these deep learning workloads far more efficiently than traditional processors.