LG CNS announced on July 27 it was selected as a founding member of the AI Materials Foundry, a global collaboration led by British AI startup CuspAI that includes 48 companies and research institutes such as Nvidia, Meta, AMD, 3M and Merck. The initiative aims to reduce time and cost for new material design, discovery, verification and commercialisation by combining participants’ data and infrastructure with CuspAI’s AI platform. 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 was reduced to about 6 months. LG CNS will introduce and operate the CuspAI platform in South Korea, supporting companies in semiconductors, chemicals and energy with materials data integration, verification interpretation, and platform setup and maintenance. Customer data will be managed on dedicated standalone servers and not reused for AI training; patent rights to new materials will be held by commissioning companies. CuspAI, headquartered in London, counts 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics laureate Geoffrey Hinton as an adviser and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos among its investors.