South Korean ASIC company Semifive has signed a $52 million agreement with a US-based AI fabless firm for the development of its next-generation AI inference chip.

The partner has not been named by Semifive but, in a statement, said the deal is its largest contract to date and represents around 60 percent of the company’s $88m in new order revenue from H1 2026.

The company added that the project is its first “Spec Hand-off” engagement in North America, a model that allows customers to provide key performance requirements and specifications, which Semifive will use as the basis for the entire development process, including design, software development, packaging, testing, and mass production.

This process allows Semifive to take the lead from an earlier development stage than with traditional turnkey models, which often require customers to complete the chip design process before outsourcing the manufacturing.

Semifive said that for the project in North America, the accelerator will adopt LPDDR6, a next-generation low-power DRAM technology, to reduce memory-related power consumption, along with PCIe Gen5 to minimize bottlenecks in high-volume data transfers. Semifive also plans to implement an architecture designed to deliver both high compute throughput and operational stability, the company said.

Tape-out is expected in the first half of 2027, with mass production slated for 2028. The partners will target the accelerator at hyperscalers and cloud service providers.

“As the AI inference market continues to expand rapidly, demand is accelerating for custom silicon optimized for each customer’s services and workloads,” said Brandon Cho, CEO and co-founder of Semifive. “By successfully commercializing this next-generation inference accelerator and improving the economics of large-scale AI models, we aim to establish Semifive as an essential custom silicon development partner for the global hyperscale infrastructure market.”

DCD took a closer look at the growing popularity of ASICs in the most recent issue of the DCD Magazine. You can read it here.