LG CNS said on July 27 it was selected as a founding member of the AI Materials Foundry, a global collaboration for developing new materials led by British AI startup CuspAI.

The AI Materials Foundry includes 48 companies and research institutes, including Nvidia, Meta, AMD, 3M and Merck. Participants will combine their experimental data, research networks and computing infrastructure with CuspAI’s AI platform. The goal is to reduce the time and cost required for everything from new material design and discovery to verification and commercialisation.

CuspAI’s platform works by having companies input target conditions for materials they want to develop, such as thermal stability or carbon capture efficiency. The AI then analyses experimental data to generate and verify candidate substances.

Finnish chemical company Kemira used the platform to explore about 300 trillion molecular structures and identified 20 candidate new materials. LG CNS said the development timeline, which had taken years, was reduced to about 6 months.

LG CNS will be responsible for introducing and operating the CuspAI platform in South Korea. It will support companies pursuing new materials development in semiconductors, chemicals and energy with materials data integration, interpretation of verification results, and platform setup and maintenance. This will allow South Korean companies to use the platform without directly building expensive research equipment or large-scale AI infrastructure.

Customer data will be managed separately on dedicated standalone servers and will not be reused for AI model training. Patent rights to new materials developed through the platform will also be held by the commissioning companies.

CuspAI, headquartered in London, developed a platform that combines AI and materials science to design and search for new substances. Geoffrey Hinton, a 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics laureate, serves as an adviser, and investors include Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.

Jang Min-yong (장민용), executive director and head of the chemicals and battery division at LG CNS, said, "We will fulfil our role as an AX partner so that South Korean manufacturing and materials companies can leverage a world-class AI-based new materials research ecosystem to generate tangible business results early."