FuriosaAI to start production of 5nm AI chip for ChatGPT
Company also planning Series C funding round for 200 billion won
South Korean AI startup FuriosaAI is planning to launch an AI chip that will support ChatGPT next year, its CEO told TheElec
FuriosaAI CEO June Paik claimed that this second-generation AI chip of the company will be the most powerful chip available for the operation of ChatGPT.
The particular chip boasts two times the performance of rival products when using the same amount of power, Paik said.
The transformer-based language model supporting chip also has eight times the performance of FuriosaAI’s first-generation AI chip, dubbed Warboy.
While Warboy was designed for the 14nm node, the second-generation launching next year will be 5nm-based and also have HBM3 embedded. It also has 30 times the bandwidth of its predecessor.
The second-generation chip will go into fab-in mid-2023 and go into production during the first quarter of 2024, the CEO said.
Paik, who previously worked at AMD and Samsung, founded FuriosaAI in 2017. The startup is a fabless chip company that specializes in neural processing unit dedicated for AI operation.
The startup’s main customer is the highly lucrative data center sector.
Warboy began production late last year and will go into mass production during the first half of 2023.
The chip gained notice in 2021 when it scored higher in performance on the AI chip benchmark site MLPerf for being superior to Nvidia’s T4.
FuriosaAI was testing the chip with various customers, which includes Kakao Enterprise, the CEO said.
Meanwhile, the startup is also preparing a Series C funding round for 200 billion won to back up the production of the second-generation chip, Paik said.
FuriosaAI is also planning a follow-up funding round for a third-generation chip and is planning to double the number of developers from the current hundred to two hundred next year, the CEO added.