By Jiyoung Sohn | Photographs by Tim Franco for WSJ
SEOUL -- The startup that is now one of a handful of chip makers nipping at the heels of Nvidia began in a hospital bed in Seoul a decade ago.
June Paik, a memory-chip engineer at Samsung Electronics, had torn his Achilles tendon while playing soccer at a company outing. Bedridden for months, he let his short hair grow out and passed the time watching online courses offered by Stanford University about the rising field of artificial intelligence.
He walked away with a healed ankle and a conviction: AI was set to become not just a novel technology but a new paradigm. Soon after, he left Samsung to start an AI company of his own.
"I left with absolute certainty that I had to get into the AI space," said Paik, who kept the long hair.
He needed a core product and a team. At a computing conference in Seoul where AI was a main theme, Paik ran into old colleagues and asked a question: "Should we be getting into AI chips?" The response was an enthusiastic "yes." In the following months, he convinced a former Samsung colleague and an old friend who was an algorithm expert to come aboard as co-founders. And in 2017, FuriosaAI was born.
Furiosa was named after the protagonist of the 2015 post-apocalyptic film, "Mad Max: Fury Road." Paik saw parallels between the warrior's against-the-odds journey back home and his goal of achieving startup success. The name came up once, off the cuff, and stuck. Furiosa's AI chip is dubbed "RNGD" -- short for renegade -- and slated to start mass production this month.
Valued at nearly $700 million based on its most recent fundraising, Furiosa has attracted interest from big tech firms. Last year, Meta Platforms attempted to acquire it, though the startup declined the offer. OpenAI used a Furiosa chip for a recent demonstration in Seoul. LG's AI research unit is testing the chip and said it offered "excellent real-world performance." Furiosa said it is engaged in talks with potential customers.
Nvidia's graphic processing units, or GPUs, dominated the initial push to train AI models. But companies like Furiosa are betting that for the next stage -- referred to as "inference," or using AI models after they're trained -- their specialty chips can be competitive.
Furiosa makes chips called neural processing units, or NPUs, which are a rising class of chips designed specifically to handle the type of computing calculations underpinning AI and use less energy than GPUs.
Paik said Furiosa's chips can provide similar performance as Nvidia's advanced GPUs with less electricity usage. That would drive down the total costs of deploying AI. The tech world, Paik says, shouldn't be so reliant on one chip maker for AI computing.
"A market dominated by a single player -- that's not a healthy ecosystem, is it?" Paik said.
Paik grew up in Daegu, a city in the southeastern region of South Korea. In 1996, he entered South Korea's prestigious Seoul National University to study electrical engineering -- a topic that applied his favorite subjects, math and physics, to real-world settings.
At that time, his parents had moved to California so his father, a pastor, could do advanced studies in theology. They encouraged Paik to study in the U.S. too. After his initial hesitation, a summer spent taking computing architecture courses at University of California, Berkeley convinced him. Paik transferred to Georgia Tech, where he got a bachelor's and a master's degree in electrical engineering.
He started working at U.S. chip maker AMD, gaining experience in GPU design. In 2013, he moved to Samsung in South Korea to lead a small team to develop new memory-chip products.
Hanjoon Kim, who worked with Paik at Samsung and left to co-found Furiosa with him, described Paik as someone who can envision and execute product ideas on a huge scale.
"I found his approach quite striking," said Kim, who is now Furiosa's chief technology officer.
Paik, 48, travels everywhere with a keyboard-sized card equipped with a RNGD chip so he can show off Furiosa's key product. A workout enthusiast, he runs and swims. On a Furiosa company outing to a coastal town, Paik and some colleagues held a race to see who could swim to a nearby island and return the fastest.
He met his wife, who also works in the AI business, through colleagues who heard she liked long-haired guys. The couple have a 3-year-old daughter.
South Korea, which boasts semiconductor know-how from homegrown firms like Samsung and SK Hynix, plus software expertise, is making a big push in AI. The government is pursuing AI development as a policy priority, hoping to become another leader in the technology alongside the U.S. and China. In recent months, OpenAI opened a new office in Seoul and Nvidia signed a major GPU-supply deal led by the South Korean government.
In Furiosa's early years, Paik often referenced the Silicon Valley bible, "Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies," to emphasize the need for fast decision-making and risk-taking to achieve market dominance as a first mover.
"He's always backed the idea that we must prioritize our long-term mission over immediate security," Kim said.
When Furiosa's 2017 seed investment round of just under $1 million ran out quickly, Paik took out loans. In 2019, Furiosa didn't pay the salaries of its senior executives for several months as the firm sought to avoid lowering its valuation while it worked to close out its next round of funding.
Paik recruited globally for talent. He flew from Seoul to Princeton, N.J., to meet and convince an engineer to join Furiosa in its early days, said Jae W. Lee, director of Seoul National University's AI Institute and a mentor to Paik. Lee recalls running into Paik at virtually every major hardware and software conference to recruit talent. Furiosa now has about 200 employees.
"He had incredible energy. I just knew he was going to make waves one day," said Lee of his first encounter with Paik at an academic conference in 2015.
In 2024, at Stanford's prestigious Hot Chips conference, Paik debuted Furiosa's RNGD chip as a solution for what he called "sustainable AI computing" in a keynote speech. Paik presented data showing how the chip could run the then-latest version of Meta's Llama large language model with more than twice the power efficiency of Nvidia's high-end chips.
Furiosa's booth was swarmed with engineers from big tech firms, including Google, Meta and Amazon.com, wanting to see a live demo of the chip.
"It was a moment where we felt we could really move forward with our chip with confidence," Paik said.
Looking back, Paik sees his Achilles injury as a turning point. Even the grueling rehab, where doctors once told him he might not fully recover, helped him weather the tough times at Furiosa.
"I think it could have been a blessing in disguise," he said.
Write to Jiyoung Sohn at jiyoung.sohn@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
January 02, 2026 23:00 ET (04:00 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2026 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
Comments