The world's top foundry (semiconductor contract manufacturing) corporations, Taiwan's TSMC, is reportedly considering an investment in domestic artificial intelligence (AI) semiconductor startup FuriosaAI. FuriosaAI is currently in acquisition negotiations with Meta.
According to the information technology (IT) industry on the 27th, TSMC's investment subsidiary, TSMC Global, has been reviewing plans to make strategic investments in FuriosaAI since the fourth quarter of last year. It is reported that both parties are discussing specific investment scale and terms.
FuriosaAI is a fabless (semiconductor design specialized company) startup developing AI inference specialized semiconductors for data center servers. It has developed cost-efficient neural processing units (NPU) named Warboy and Renegade compared to NVIDIA's AI semiconductors, with Renegade being mass-produced through TSMC's 5NANO (nanometer; 1NANO is one-billionth of a meter) process.
Meta is currently in negotiations for the acquisition of FuriosaAI, with results expected to materialize as early as next month. Meta has been working on developing AI semiconductors optimized for its own large language model (LLM), while reducing its dependence on NVIDIA.