LG CNS said on the 27th that it has joined as a founding member of the "AI Materials Foundry," an alliance formed and led by British artificial intelligence (AI) startup CuspAI. LG CNS will take on the role of distributing CuspAI's AI platform for new materials development to companies in Korea.
The AI Materials Foundry is a global alliance in which companies and research institutions across the fields of AI, chemistry, materials, and computing infrastructure use AI to lead innovation in new materials development. A total of 48 global companies and research institutions, including Nvidia, Meta, and AMD, are participating. Materials companies such as 3M and Merck are also taking part in the foundry to develop new materials. Within the AI Materials Foundry, CuspAI provides the infrastructure to support the entire process from designing industrial new materials to their discovery, verification, and commercialization.
CuspAI is a company that has combined AI and materials science to shorten the new materials development process and has developed a platform that designs or explores new substances using AI. Geoffrey Hinton, professor emeritus at the University of Toronto in Canada and a 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics laureate, serves as an advisor. Recently, the company received an investment of 450 million dollars (about 680 billion won) from figures including Amazon board chairman Jeff Bezos, earning it a corporate valuation of 4 trillion won.
The foundry integrates the high-quality experimental data, research networks, and computing infrastructure of participating companies into CuspAI's agentic AI platform. Through this, it aims to dramatically shorten the cost and time of new materials development. When conditions and characteristics for developing a desired substance—such as compounds with excellent thermal stability or materials with high carbon capture efficiency—are entered into CuspAI's platform, the AI generates and verifies vast quantities of candidate substances based on the experimental data it has learned. Finnish chemical company Kemira used the platform to successfully shorten a development period that had taken several years to around six months. In the process, it explored 300 trillion molecular structures and derived 20 new material candidates.
As a delivery partner for CuspAI's agentic AI platform, LG CNS helps domestic materials companies develop new materials by leveraging the global research ecosystem. Because it handles everything from processing the materials data to be applied to the platform, to interpreting verification results, operating the platform, and maintenance, client companies can carry out new materials development projects without dedicated AI personnel.
Jang Min-yong, head of LG CNS's Chemical and Battery Business Division, said, "We will fulfill our role as a partner so that domestic materials companies can generate tangible business results early on by utilizing the AI-based new materials research ecosystem."
