Despite China’s best efforts, no one’s going to steal the AI training crown from Nvidia’s hardware any time soon, but inference is another matter entirely. Whole industries are gearing up to compete with Team Green on that front. South Korea-based FuriosaAI’s RNGD platform, for example, is entering mass production and could offer stiff competition when it comes to energy savings and performance, The Wall Street Journal reports.
The RNGD chip is a neural processor designed to power the kind of matrix computations and parallel operations that running AI inference workloads require. That gives companies like FuriosaAI, with bespoke neural processing hardware, a real chance to capture some of Nvidia’s dominance in the inference space. Just as Chinese companies are looking to fill the gap left by trade-blocked Nvidia chips, FuriosaAI is looking to provide an alternative for Western markets eager for options.
Founded by former AMD GPU and Samsung Electronics engineer June Paik, and several of his previous Samsung colleagues, FuriosaAI has been developing machine learning hardware since 2017, but it’s finally set to launch its first inferencing hardware. The RNGD, short for “Renegade,” is designed to shake up an industry that Paik feels has become too reliant on Nvidia. “A market dominated by a single player—that’s not a healthy ecosystem, is it?” he tells the WSJ.
FuriosaAI pitches its RNGD system as not just faster and more efficient, but readily available, too. (Credit: FuriosaAI)
The company has now secured enough funding to value it at over $700 million, giving it a strong foundation to launch its underdog attempt to steal market share from under Nvidia. Meta tried to acquire the company in 2025 for a cool $800 million, but Paik refused. LG has reportedly tested out the AI hardware and claims it has shown excellent performance, with other companies now said to be in talks with FuriosaAI about leveraging its new hardware when available.
In its collaboration with LG in 2025, FuriosaAI showed that the company’s EXAONE AI model could run on RNGD hardware with up to 2.25 times the inference performance of competing GPUs. “We can support a wide variety of AI models efficiently. But unlike GPUs, which are still fundamentally general-purpose processors, our architecture is natively built for AI computing. We do not develop our chip for rendering or mining,” Paik said at the time.
Recommended by Our Editors
With mass production of the RNGD chip beginning this January, it won’t be long before FuriosaAI will be able to make good on some of its promises. How Nvidia and its other competitors respond will be interesting to see.
Get Our Best Stories!
Your Daily Dose of Our Top Tech News
By clicking Sign Me Up, you confirm you are 16+ and agree to our Terms of Use and Privacy
Policy.
Thanks for signing up!
Your subscription has been confirmed. Keep an eye on your inbox!
About Our Expert
Jon Martindale
Contributor
Experience
Jon Martindale is a tech journalist from the UK, with 20 years of experience covering all manner of PC components and associated gadgets. He’s written for a range of publications, including ExtremeTech, Digital Trends, Forbes, U.S. News & World Report, and Lifewire, among others. When not writing, he’s a big board gamer and reader, with a particular habit of speed-reading through long manga sagas.
Jon covers the latest PC components, as well as how-to guides on everything from how to take a screenshot to how to set up your cryptocurrency wallet. He particularly enjoys the battles between the top tech giants in CPUs and GPUs, and tries his best not to take sides.
Jon’s gaming PC is built around the iconic 7950X3D CPU, with a 7900XTX backing it up. That’s all the power he needs to play lightweight indie and casual games, as well as more demanding sim titles like Kerbal Space Program. He uses a pair of Jabra Active 8 earbuds and a SteelSeries Arctis Pro wireless headset, and types all day on a Logitech G915 mechanical keyboard.
Read Full Bio
&w=1024&resize=1024,1024&ssl=1 "Google identifica e exclui conta falsa em plataforma exclusiva para autoridades policiais")
&w=1024&resize=1024,1024&ssl=1 "Xiaomi 15T e Xiaomi 15T Pro são lançados no Brasil a partir de R$ 7,5 mil")
:strip_icc()/i.s3.glbimg.com/v1/AUTH_08fbf48bc0524877943fe86e43087e7a/internal_photos/bs/2024/p/R/0BYuzxSWGO5VBWegIiqg/75.jpg?w=1024&resize=1024,1024&ssl=1 "Conversa com IA? Redes da Meta vão usar seus dados para anúncios; entenda")
