Douzone Bizon on Feb. 19 signed a business agreement with AI chip company FuriosaAI at Douzone Eulji Tower in Jung-gu, Seoul, to globally commercialise NPU-based AI solutions.

An NPU is a neural processing unit used for developing generative AI. It uses less power than a graphics processing unit (GPU) and has strong advantages in AI inference and computation. FuriosaAI, an AI chip design company, was founded in 2017 and has begun mass production of its second-generation chip Renegade (RNGD) after commercialising its first-generation NPU for computer vision.

Under the agreement, the two companies will pursue a range of cooperation activities aimed at commercialising AI solutions based on Renegade in South Korea and overseas.

They will focus in particular on running and applying Douzone Bizon’s ONE AI in FuriosaAI’s NPU environment. In private environments such as the public sector and finance, where security and stability are important, infrastructure design that considers power and operational efficiency is important. The two companies will verify this using Renegade-based infrastructure.

They will also secure market applicability and technical reliability. Based on service operating environments in real-world settings, they will objectively verify performance of AI services based on South Korean NPUs and throughput relative to power consumption. They will confirm and accumulate the results through a reliable third-party verification framework.

Douzone Bizon said the cooperation will reduce dependence on expensive foreign GPUs and secure an independent option for AI infrastructure using South Korean AI semiconductors. FuriosaAI plans to expand its supply channels by targeting Douzone Bizon’s corporate customers, and to use enterprise core-task application cases and feedback for future market development.

A Douzone Bizon official said, "This agreement will be an important turning point for the self-reliance of South Korean AI technology and strengthening global competitiveness," adding, "We will combine Douzone Bizon’s AI solution capabilities with FuriosaAI’s semiconductor technology to build an efficient and highly reliable global AI business model."