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The cost of AI acceleration hardware is rising steadily. Next-generation chips demand higher power consumption and massive infrastructure investment. For many startups and small enterprises, the cost and complexity of large-scale AI deployment already pose a barrier even before software development begins.
Emerging silicon vendors such as FuriosaAI are seeking to rethink this landscape, focusing on efficiency, performance, and alternatives to the GPU-dominated market.
Headquartered in South Korea, FuriosaAI specializes in developing high-performance AI inference chips designed to reduce power consumption and ease pressure on data centers. Its latest processor, RNGD, is built on the company’s proprietary tensor contraction processor architecture, enabling it to run demanding AI models without relying on traditional GPU frameworks.
Before co-founding FuriosaAI in 2017, June Paik, the company’s CEO, worked as a hardware and software engineer at AMD and Samsung. We spoke with him about the challenges facing AI chip startups, the future of data centers, and how FuriosaAI plans to compete in an industry shaped by energy constraints, infrastructure costs, and NVIDIA’s long-standing dominance.
Q: Historically, many great companies have emerged in Japan and Europe (such as STMicroelectronics, NEC, etc.). Why are there so few AI chip vendors outside China and the United States?
A: First, I would like to challenge your premise: in the AI sector, hardly any hardware startup has been able to shake NVIDIA’s dominance. Even 15 years after AlexNet, we are still in the early stages of this industry. Furthermore, several innovators in AI hardware, such as Hailo and Axelera, are not actually from the U.S. or China.
Yet the list remains short for structural reasons.
Unlike cryptocurrency mining, where algorithms are fixed and simple ASIC miners work well, AI is evolving and changing at a rapid pace.
Developing chips for ever‑shifting market requirements requires expertise in hardware and compilers, which tends to be concentrated in regions with a strong semiconductor heritage. In addition, only a few parts of the world have built deep partnerships with fabs and chip manufacturing partners.
This is why being based in South Korea actually gives Furiosa a competitive advantage.
We have access to world‑class engineering programs at Korean universities and top talent from Korea’s tech giants. We have also established partnerships with leading companies in Korea — for instance, SK Hynix provides HBM3 for our second‑generation inference chip RNGD — and with other leading players across Asia, such as our foundry partner TSMC.
Our distance from Silicon Valley has also forced us to adopt a highly disciplined approach. Furiosa started with just $1 million in seed funding, and we spent years refining our concept before taping out and delivering our chips.
We are fully committed to our tensor‑contraction‑based approach and have been able to ignore conventional wisdom and hype from Silicon Valley.
However, hardware must compete in the global market; we cannot remain only a regional supplier. Now that RNGD is in mass production, we are working with enterprise customers around the world.
