FuriosaAI speeds up development of next-gen AI chip with Hugging Face  

FuriosaAI Inc., South Korea’s fabless chip designer, has teamed up with Hugging Face Inc., a New York-based AI company boasting a massive transformer library that has contributed to the global ChatGPT hype, to expedite its development of a next-generation AI chip, the company announced on Wednesday.

The Korean system chip startup is developing an inference chip that can support large-scale language modeling offered by Hugging Face’s Transformers, an open-source AI code and model library for natural language processing applications.

The new AI chip will run on the HBM3 chip, the third-generation high-bandwidth memory chip, to ensure seamless, simultaneous processing of large-scale data.

It has already completed the new chip’s design and aims to mass produce the chip with 5-nanometer (nm) fabrication technology, according to the company.  

FuriosaAI and Hugging Face are jointly working on the development of a software package that can optimize transformers-backed hyperscale language modeling as well as vision and speech models for the next-generation AI chip and improve processing efficiency.

They are also seeking to launch a joint business, targeting global AI companies by the time the new AI chip makes its market debut.

Julien Chaumond, Hugging Face’s chief technology officer (CTO), expected the close partnership between Hugging Face and FuriosaAI on next-generation AI development to ensure better AI model services to customers.

“We will come up with a full-stack AI chip solution that can support fast-advancing AI applications,” said June Paik, FuriosaAI’s chief executive, discussing the partnership. 

RARE KOREAN FABLESS CHIPMAKER

FuriosaAI is a rare Korean fabless system chip designer with a specialty in AI chips, challenging global giant Nvidia Corp.

It was founded in 2017 after tech experts from Samsung Electronics Co., Apple Inc., Qualcomm Inc., Advanced Micro Devices Inc., Google LLC and Amazon.com Inc. joined the firm. It has so far attracted 80 billion won ($61.3 million) in investment from Naver D2SF, DSC Investment and the Korea Development Bank, marking the biggest funding for an AI chip company at home at that time.

The company is hoping to ride on the global ChatGPT frenzy because AI chips play a key role in processing massive data to run generative AI. It has already developed its own silicon chip Warboy, designed for high-performance computer vision.

In June last year, the Korean government also announced a plan to invest 1.02 trillion won in the AI semiconductor sector and foster over 7,000 experts to stay competitive in the global chip industry.

Korea is home to the world’s top two memory chipmakers, Samsung Electronics Co. and SK Hynix Inc., accounting for more than half of the global memory market.

But it represents a mere 3% of the much larger non-memory or system chip market.

Write to Da-eun Choi at max@hankyung.com

Sookyung Seo edited this article.