LG Uplus is joining hands with AI semiconductor company FuriosaAI to develop a "sovereign AI appliance" that processes data inside corporations.
The two companies said on Mar. 8 that they signed a related memorandum of understanding (MOU) on Mar. 4 at the MWC26 site in Barcelona, Spain.
A sovereign AI appliance refers to an all-in-one AI device that processes corporations' data only within in-house infrastructure without sending it to an external cloud.
The device will include LG Uplus' enterprise AI platform, LG AI Research's AI model EXAONE (EXAONE (LG AI Research)) 4.0, and FuriosaAI's second-generation Neural Processing Unit (NPU). Even without building a separate, complex server, users can start immediately by connecting only power and the network.
LG Uplus plans to offer retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) that finds corporations' documents and generates answers, a knowledge management system (KMS), document summarization, and workflow automation through this device. In particular, it aims to enable stable use of AI even in closed networks separated from the external internet, targeting sectors with high security requirements such as the public sector, defense, healthcare, finance, manufacturing, and research institutions as primary use cases. FuriosaAI, based on RNGD, will focus on boosting inference performance and power efficiency even in environments where many users connect simultaneously.
The two companies expect that by implementing a sovereign AI model that can be operated directly within corporations, AI can be used reliably even in areas where the use of external clouds is limited, such as the public sector, defense, healthcare, finance, manufacturing, and research institutions.
Starting with this partnership, LG Uplus and FuriosaAI plan to expand cooperation to NPU subscription services (NPUaaS) based on AI data centers and physical AI.