❯ FuriosaAI raises $620 million to scale production inference chips globally

The financing is closedSouth Korea’s FuriosaAI confirmed a $620 million Series D at a $2.9 billion post-money valuation. The National Growth Fund committed approximately $280 million. Other participants include Cisco Investments, Infinitum, Jericho Capital and NAVER. Bloomberg’s accessible report describes the valuation as roughly quadrupling.

Dedicated compute for running modelsFounded in 2017, FuriosaAI focuses on inference: the computing used to serve models repeatedly after training. Its second-generation RNGD entered mass production in January. The accelerator is offered as a 180-watt, air-cooled PCIe card, designed for enterprises’ existing power and cooling arrangements rather than requiring an entirely new facility.

Customers deploy production workloadsFuriosaAI says Samsung SDS has launched an RNGD-powered NPU-as-a-Service offering and LG companies are deploying it in on-premises and hybrid environments. Cloud providers buy hardware to sell inference capacity, while enterprises use it for their own applications. Both care about model support, concurrency and users served per unit of power.

Funding spans two generationsThe company plans to manufacture 20,000 RNGD cards this year and says it has secured memory and fabrication capacity to more than double production in 2027. Funds will scale manufacturing and international deployment while supporting a third-generation chip under development with Broadcom and other partners, using a planned 2nm multi-die design and HBM4/4E memory.

▮ SIGNALInference-chip fundraising is moving from proving that silicon works to proving it can be manufactured, support models and operate in customers’ production systems.