Krafton Bets KRW 50 Billion on HyperAccel's LPU Chips to Cut AI Inference Costs, Marking Rare Game-to-Chip Move

Seoul, June 23, 2026 — Krafton Inc. (259960.KS), the South Korean game developer behind PUBG: Battlegrounds, has agreed to invest approximately KRW 50 billion (USD 36 million) as a strategic investor in the Series B round of AI semiconductor startup HyperAccel, the company disclosed Monday. The move marks a rare instance of a listed game publisher directly backing a chipmaker, underscoring Krafton's declared pivot toward becoming an "AI-first" technology company.

Krafton's commitment represents roughly one-third of HyperAccel's total Series B fundraising target of KRW 150 billion (USD 108 million). The proceeds are earmarked to accelerate the commercial launch of HyperAccel's proprietary Language Processing Unit (LPU) architecture — an AI inference chip engineered specifically for large language model (LLM) workloads.

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What HyperAccel Offers: LPUs as a Low-Cost Nvidia Alternative

HyperAccel, a fabless startup founded in 2023 by Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) professor Kim Joo-young, has developed a chip it calls the Bertha, manufactured on a 4-nanometer process with mass production targeted to begin in early 2026. Unlike conventional AI accelerators that rely on costly and supply-constrained High Bandwidth Memory (HBM), Bertha uses LPDDR memory, which is both cheaper and more widely available.

According to the company, the LPU delivers:

• 1/10th the cost of a comparable GPU-based inference setup
• 67% reduction in power consumption versus equivalent GPU configurations
• 19x better price-performance ratio than traditional GPU supercomputer clusters
• Up to 2x throughput improvement for transformer-based LLM inference tasks

HyperAccel raised KRW 55 billion in its Series A, which it used to complete chip design and initiate foundry partnerships. SemiSix has already signed a mass-production contract for the Bertha chip.

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Krafton's Strategic Calculus: Inference Is a Game-Company Problem

Krafton's decision to invest in a chipmaker stems directly from its own AI infrastructure buildout. The company has spent USD 70 million on a GPU cluster to power AI characters and agentic AI systems inside its game titles, and concluded from that experience that inference cost is a core competitive variable for AI-enabled gaming.

The company's PUBG infrastructure — a persistent virtual environment with millions of concurrent interactions — gives physical AI systems a training ground. Krafton views HyperAccel's LPU as a way to run those inference workloads at a fraction of current Nvidia GPU costs, reducing both operating expenses and dependence on a single chip supplier.

The HyperAccel Series B follows Krafton's recently disclosed collaboration with a Korean aerospace firm that includes investment of up to USD 1 billion, further signalling its intent to extend beyond entertainment into physical AI and defense applications.

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Market Context

South Korea has been actively cultivating a domestic AI semiconductor ecosystem as an alternative to Nvidia's dominant H-series GPUs. HyperAccel joins a cohort of Korean LPU and neural processing unit (NPU) startups competing for enterprise inference contracts, with backing from both strategic investors and government-aligned venture funds.

Krafton's stock (259960.KS) has outperformed the broader KOSPI technology cohort year-to-date, supported by PUBG's resilience and growing investor confidence in the company's AI pivot. The HyperAccel investment adds a chip-layer asset to Krafton's AI portfolio, potentially delivering downstream cost advantages should the Bertha chip reach commercial scale by late 2026.

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Key Numbers

Sources: KED Global (June 23, 2026); Bloomingbit / HyperAccel investor disclosures; Seoul Economic Daily (April 2026)

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