From Korea with the AI Accelerator: FuriosaAI Lands in Europe via Equinix

"Artificial intelligence" has so far been more or less synonymous with "GPU," which has in turn meant "NVIDIA." However, the market is changing, with many companies offering various types of accelerators, often not based on the GPU model. This is the case for FuriosaAI, a South Korean company that is entering the European market thanks to Equinix.

FuriosaAI's AI Accelerators Arrive in Europe

FuriosaAI was founded in 2017 and has achieved various successes in its home country, for example with LG. The company is now set to land in Europe with its RNGD accelerators (pronounced "renegade"). These accelerators are produced by TSMC using the 5 nm process, equipped with 48 GB of HBM3 memory providing a bandwidth of 1.5 TB/s, and offering computing power of 512 TFLOPS with FP8 precision.

The most interesting aspect of FuriosaAI’s accelerators is that, compared to NVIDIA's GPUs, they are much more efficient. Each accelerator consumes only 180 W; the NVIDIA RTX Pro 6000, which is the closest competing GPU to the RNGD, indeed offers double the memory and double the computing capacity, but also consumes over three times as much. The company points out that a 3 kW system with RNGD offers a significantly higher inference capacity per rack [compared to GPUs] while maintaining a strong performance per watt profile for agentic AI.

Equinix will be bringing the chips to Europe, making them available in its LS2 data center in Lisbon. The choice of location is not random, as FuriosaAI has recently opened its European headquarters right in the Portuguese capital. "We are pleased to establish an important new distribution channel in Europe with Equinix," said FuriosaAI co-founder and CEO June Paik. "By combining Equinix's infrastructure designed for efficiency and sustainability with our high-performance and energy-efficient RNGD architecture, we make it possible for companies to perform inference sustainably and reliably."