American multinational technology conglomerate Meta (formerly the Facebook company) is reportedly in talks to acquire South Korean AI chip company FuriosaAI.
The transaction might conclude as early as this month, according to Forbes, which cited unnamed people with knowledge of the situation. The story also stated that Meta was not the only business interested in buying the semiconductor company.
Established by former employees of Samsung and AMD, FuriosaAI develops chips to speed up AI models, including textual models like Meta’s Llama 2 and Llama 3.
To date, the company has raised roughly 90 billion Korean won ($61.94 million), including from Naver, the biggest search engine and Internet portal in South Korea.
Meta’s move comes days after the firm commenced company-wide layoffs next week and has started the process of hiring machine learning engineers.
According to a memo from Meta’s Head of People, Janelle Gale, cited by Reuters, workers who are scheduled to lose their employment will begin receiving notifications at 5 a.m. local time on Monday in the majority of countries, including the United States.
But “due to local regulations,” workers in Germany, France, Italy, and the Netherlands are not affected by these changes. Between February 11 and February 18, workers in more than a dozen additional nations across Europe, Asia, and Africa will receive their alerts.
VP of Engineering for Monetization Peng Fan also urged employees to assist with a faster hiring process for machine learning engineers and other “business critical” positions in a different memo.