Bloomberg reported on the 30th (local time) that Meta, Facebook's parent company, is seeking to acquire U.S. semiconductor startup Rivos.
With the explosive growth of the artificial intelligence (AI) market, demand for AI semiconductors needed to run data centers is surging, and Meta is seen as trying to reduce its dependence on Nvidia, which monopolizes the related market, by developing its own AI semiconductors.
Rivos, headquartered in Santa Clara, California, is a graphics processing unit (GPU) design company invested in by Intel Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Lip-Bu Tan, who also serves as chairman of the board. Rivos is focusing on chip designs based on the open-source RISC-V architecture instead of the existing commercial license structure developed by British semiconductor design company Arm.
Specific acquisition terms are unknown, but as of August, Rivos sought to raise investment based on a corporate valuation of $2 billion (about 2.8 trillion won).
Meta, which is seen as trailing OpenAI and Google in the AI race, is making aggressive investments, buying GPUs worth billions of dollars each year from manufacturers including Nvidia to achieve "superintelligence" AI. Meta is developing its in-house AI chip, the "Meta Training and Inference Accelerator" (MTIA), to reduce its dependence on Nvidia and cut GPU expense, and the Rivos acquisition is viewed as a decision to support that effort.
Song I-jun, Meta's vice president of engineering, said on LinkedIn, "Rivos has expertise in building full-stack AI systems," and noted that the company plans to speed up MTIA research with the Rivos acquisition.
Earlier, Meta considered acquiring Korean semiconductor startup FuriosaAI for $800 million (about 1.1 trillion won), but FuriosaAI rejected the offer.