...

'Furiosa’s AI chip is dubbed “RNGD”—short for renegade—and slated to start mass production this month.

Valued at nearly $700 million based on its most recent fundraising, Furiosa has attracted interest from big tech firms. Last year, Meta Platforms attempted to acquire it, though the startup declined the offer. OpenAI used a Furiosa chip for a recent demonstration in Seoul. LG’s AI research unit is testing the chip and said it offered “excellent real-world performance.” Furiosa said it is engaged in talks with potential customers.

Nvidia’s graphic processing units, or GPUs, dominated the initial push to train AI models. But companies like Furiosa are betting that for the next stage—referred to as “inference,” or using AI models after they’re trained—their specialty chips can be competitive.

Furiosa makes chips called neural processing units, or NPUs, which are a rising class of chips designed specifically to handle the type of computing calculations underpinning AI and use less energy than GPUs.

Paik said Furiosa’s chips can provide similar performance as Nvidia’s advanced GPUs with less electricity usage. That would drive down the total costs of deploying AI. The tech world, Paik says, shouldn’t be so reliant on one chip maker for AI computing.'

...