LG CNS joins global AI materials alliance as South Korea's founding member

LG CNS will join a global AI consortium for advanced-materials development — anchored by tech giants including Nvidia and Meta — as South Korea's representative IT-sector member. The company plans to use the global ecosystem built through the alliance to accelerate AI transformation among domestic advanced-materials firms.

LG CNS announced Monday that it has been selected as a founding member of the AI Materials Foundry, a global alliance organized by Cusp AI.

The AI Materials Foundry is a global coalition of companies and research institutions in AI, chemistry, materials science and computing infrastructure, working together to drive innovation in advanced-materials development. It currently counts 48 global companies and research institutions among its members, including Nvidia, Meta and AMD. Global materials leaders such as 3M and Merck are also participating and developing new materials through the foundry. Cusp AI provides infrastructure through the alliance covering the entire process — from designing and identifying industrial materials to validation and commercialization.

The alliance aims to cut the cost and time of advanced-materials development by integrating members' high-quality experimental data, research networks and computing infrastructure into Cusp AI's agentic AI platform.

LG CNS plans to use the Cusp AI agentic AI platform to support domestic companies in the semiconductor, chemical and energy sectors searching for new materials. Users can input desired properties and conditions — such as compounds with high thermal stability or materials with superior carbon-capture efficiency — and the AI generates and validates candidate substances based on experimental data it has learned from.

According to LG CNS, Finnish chemical company Kemira used the platform to cut a development cycle that previously took several years down to roughly six months. The platform also screened about 300 trillion molecular structures to identify 20 advanced-materials candidates.

In addition, LG CNS said it will act as a platform delivery partner, leveraging the global research ecosystem to support advanced-materials development at domestic manufacturing and materials companies. The approach lets firms build a platform-centered development environment without expensive research equipment or large-scale AI infrastructure. LG CNS will handle everything from processing materials data fed into the platform to interpreting validation results, as well as platform operation and maintenance.

LG CNS said the Cusp AI platform also includes safeguards against technology leaks and intellectual property risks. Customer data is isolated and managed on dedicated, independent servers and is not reused to train AI models. Ownership of patents related to newly developed materials is explicitly assigned to the client company.

Meanwhile, Cusp AI is an AI startup that combines AI and materials science to shorten the advanced-materials development process, using AI to design and explore optimized new substances. Geoffrey Hinton, who won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics, serves on its advisory board. The company recently raised about 680 billion won ($463 million) and has been valued at around 4 trillion won, with Amazon founder Jeff Bezos among its key investors.

"Improving cost and time efficiency in advanced-materials development is directly tied to a company's core competitiveness," said Jang Min-yong, head of LG CNS's chemicals and battery business division. "AI is no longer optional — it is essential. We will fulfill our role as an AX partner so that domestic manufacturing and materials companies can tap into the AI-based advanced-materials research ecosystem and generate business results sooner."