Samsung SDS said on July 20 it launched NPU as a Service (NPUaaS) on SCP (Samsung Cloud Platform) based on FuriosaAI's second-generation NPU, Renegade (RGND).

Samsung SDS said FuriosaAI's second-generation Renegade is a Korean-made NPU specialized for AI inference and features better power efficiency and cost performance than GPUs at the stage of applying already trained AI models to real services to handle answer generation, document analysis and image classification.

Samsung SDS NPUaaS customers can use it on a subscription basis through SCP without buying NPU servers or building them in their own data centers. Customers can also freely choose the number of NPUs they want in units such as 1, 2, 4 or 8, depending on corporate demand and data scale, allowing use from startups to large companies to fit the scale of AI services.

It can also be used in conjunction with various SCP products, including high-performance storage and compute and high-speed networks. Samsung SDS plans to provide the NPUaaS in an SCP sovereign cloud environment so that public-sector customers subject to strict security regulations can use it with confidence.

Samsung SDS said the NPUaaS launch, which expands its offering beyond existing GPUaaS to include NPU-based computing resources, is expected to broaden customers' AI infrastructure choices and become a major turning point for the spread of Korean-made NPU-based AI infrastructure and the building of sovereign AI.

Lee Ho-jun (이호준), head of Samsung SDS' Cloud Service Business Division and a vice president, said, "This NPUaaS launch goes beyond simply introducing a new cloud product and is meaningful in that customers can use high-performance AI technology more flexibly and with better cost performance." He added, "Samsung SDS will continue to diversify SCP-based products to address customer needs and continuously lead the cloud AI technology ecosystem."