This article was published on Feb. 12, 2025, at 4:54 p.m. on the ChosunBiz MoneyMove site.
Global IT company Meta (formerly Facebook) is reportedly reviewing the acquisition of domestic artificial intelligence (AI) semiconductor startup FuriosaAI. Although it is not yet in a serious discussion stage regarding the corporate value, the domestic and international IT sectors are showing a high interest in the success of this deal.
While FuriosaAI is pursuing the sale of its management rights, Rebellion, which is considered one of the two major domestic AI semiconductor startups along with Furiosa, plans to go public in the first half of next year. With its technology already recognized by global IT companies, an analysis indicates that both Rebellion and Furiosa have significantly increased their corporate values following favorable winds from the Chinese startup DeepSeek.
According to investment banking (IB) industry sources on the 12th, Meta is seriously considering acquiring FuriosaAI. An industry insider said, “Negotiations are not yet significantly advanced, and I understand that Meta is conducting technical verification.” Although specific sale conditions, including corporate value, have not been determined, the industry believes that 800 billion won will serve as a benchmark. 800 billion won is the valuation FuriosaAI received when it received Series C bridge funding last year.
Meta has recently developed its own AI chip called ‘MTIA’, but it is reported not to be performing as expected. As a result, the company is still using Nvidia chips at a substantial expense. Nvidia holds about an 80% market share in the AI accelerator market.
In this situation, industry insiders explain that FuriosaAI's next-generation AI semiconductor ‘Renegade (RNGD)’ could serve as an alternative to Nvidia’s products. FuriosaAI previously stated in August last year that Renegade would be an ideal choice for the large-scale deployment of advanced generative AI models such as Meta's Lama 2 and Lama 3.
The industry believes that domestic startups' AI semiconductors have already been recognized for their product capabilities by global corporations. Rebellion's chips are reported to have been supplied to Meta through a local distributor in the United States last year.
An IB industry source noted, “Global IT companies discovered that Rebellion products are faster and use less power than Nvidia GPUs, which has increased their interest in Korean AI semiconductor companies,” adding that “both FuriosaAI and Rebellion have reportedly received several acquisition offers from global corporations.”
Moreover, as China's AI startup DeepSeek has achieved high performance without using Nvidia's expensive chips, global companies' interest in domestic AI semiconductor companies is increasing. DeepSeek reportedly used Nvidia's ‘H800’ during the training phase but is said to have used Huawei's ‘Ascend 910C’ chip during the inference phase, which has garnered attention.
Both FuriosaAI and Rebellion are expected to benefit from the ‘DeepSeek Shock’, but Rebellion has decided to take a different path from FuriosaAI. Having completed a merger with SK-affiliated startup Sapion at the end of last year, Rebellion plans to go public without selling its management rights to a third party.
According to industry sources, Rebellion is expected to go public on the Korea Securities Market in the first half of next year. There are also internal reviews for listing on overseas markets thereafter, but domestic listing takes priority for now. To this end, it is reported that Rebellion will coordinate the timing of its preliminary listing examination application in the second half of this year. This year's expected sales are estimated to be between 60 billion and 100 billion won.