A Korean chip startup wants to sell Europe a cooler, cheaper alternative to Nvidia. Its first “renegade” accelerators just went live in a Lisbon datacentre.
FuriosaAI has switched on its RNGD AI accelerators in Europe. The South Korean startup is installing RNGD servers at Equinix’s LS2 datacentre in Lisbon, it announced on Tuesday. The name is pronounced “renegade.”
The Lisbon deployment builds on a foothold Furiosa already has there. The company runs a compiler-focused R&D lab in the city, plus a new flagship office. The timing is deliberate. The reveal coincides with the RAISE Summit in Paris. It lands as European enterprises hunt for efficient AI compute they can source close to home.
The efficiency pitch
RNGD is built for power, not headline speed. Each accelerator uses a 5nm Tensor Contraction Processor design. It delivers 512 teraFLOPS of FP8 and holds to a strict 180-watt thermal profile. Eight of them form the NXT RNGD Server, a 3kW system. Furiosa pitches it as a dense, air-cooled inference engine that drops into standard racks. No liquid cooling or retrofits required.
The efficiency gap is the selling point. The Register notes that Nvidia’s nearest rival card, the RTX Pro 6000, offers twice the memory and compute. It also draws more than three times the power. “We unlock the ability for enterprises to run inference sustainably and reliably,” said co-founder and chief executive June Paik.
Why Europe, why now
The move is as much about mindshare as sales. Europe is racing to build its own AI infrastructure and cut its reliance on American silicon. Its chip sector, meanwhile, frets about the future. A part that sips power and fits today’s racks is an easier sell when energy bills are climbing.
Furiosa is also building for the next round. It is working with Broadcom on a third-generation accelerator. That chip targets frontier models with a trillion or more parameters. It will use faster HBM4 memory for hyperscale inference. RNGD itself is already in mass production, made on TSMC’s process with SK hynix memory. Furiosa says it has raised more than $250M to date.
Why it matters
Furiosa will not dethrone Nvidia. Its cards are smaller and slower. Its next chip also leans on HBM4 memory that is only now reaching the market. But that is not the bet. Some European buyers simply want a chip they can run cheaply, cool quietly, and buy outside the United States. Furiosa joins a crowded field of Nvidia challengers. They are all trying to prove there is room for more than one name in AI compute.
