[Edaily Reporter Shin Yeong-bin ] LG CNS (#LG CNS) has joined a global artificial intelligence (AI) new materials development consortium—which includes NVIDIA, Meta, and AMD—as a founding member. The company plans to significantly expand its AX business, which supports new materials development for domestic manufacturing and materials companies.

LG Corp. announced on the 27th that it has been selected as a founding member of “AI Materials Foundry,” a global consortium led by the British AI startup Cusp AI.

The AI Materials Foundry is a global alliance of companies and research institutions in the fields of AI, chemistry, materials, and computing infrastructure that are collaborating to drive innovation in the development of AI-based new materials. Forty-eight global companies and research institutions, including NVIDIA, Meta, and AMD, are participating. Global materials companies such as 3M and Merck have also joined.

Through the AI Materials Foundry, CuspAI provides infrastructure that supports the entire process of designing, discovering, validating, and commercializing new industrial materials. The goal is to reduce the cost and time required for new material development by integrating participating companies’ experimental data, research networks, and computing infrastructure into CuspAI’s agentic AI platform.

Headquartered in London, Cusp AI is a startup that combines AI and materials science to accelerate the new materials development process and has developed a platform that uses AI to design and explore optimized new substances. Jeffrey Hinton, the 2024 Nobel Laureate in Physics, serves on its advisory board, and the company recently secured approximately 680 billion won in investment, achieving a valuation of about 4 trillion won.

LG CNS plans to utilize Cusp AI’s Agentic AI platform to support Korean companies pursuing the discovery of new materials in cutting-edge industries such as semiconductors, chemicals, and energy.

The process works by having companies input the conditions and characteristics of the substances they wish to develop—such as compounds with high thermal stability or materials with high carbon capture efficiency—into the platform. The AI then generates and validates candidate materials based on experimental data it has learned.

According to the company, the Finnish chemical firm Kemira used this platform to reduce its development time—which previously took several years—to about six months. It also identified 20 candidate new materials by exploring approximately 300 trillion molecular structures.

As a platform delivery partner, LG CNS supports domestic manufacturing and materials companies in leveraging the global research ecosystem without having to build their own expensive research equipment or large-scale AI infrastructure.

Specifically, it handles everything from processing material data for the platform and interpreting validation results to platform operation and maintenance. The company explains that this allows clients to carry out new material development projects without needing a dedicated AI team.

The Cusp AI platform also features safeguards to prevent technology leakage and protect intellectual property rights. Client data is isolated and managed on independent, dedicated servers and is not reused for training AI models. The structure ensures that the client company retains ownership of patents related to the new materials.

In the field of new materials development, the time required to discover materials is directly linked to industrial competitiveness. AI can explore and validate countless material combinations in a short period to identify high-potential candidates, and is thus being utilized to transform research and development methods in the manufacturing and materials industries.

Jang Min-yong, Senior Vice President and Head of the Chemicals and Batteries Business Division at LG CNS, stated, “Improving cost and time efficiency in the field of new materials development is directly linked to a company’s core competitiveness.” He added, “We will fulfill our role as an AX partner to enable domestic manufacturing and materials companies to leverage a world-class AI-based new materials research ecosystem and generate tangible business results at an early stage.”