According to a report from Korean media outlet BusinessKorea, Rebellions’ CTO Oh Jin-wook announced that the company will adjust its production plans, bypassing the initially planned Rebel ‘Single’ product to focus on the mass production of the Rebel Quad AI chip by the end of the year.

This chip, manufactured using Samsung’s 4nm process, will be equipped with four Samsung’s 12-stack 5th generation High Bandwidth Memory (HBM3e), by the end of the year, offering a total memory capacity of 144GB.

Per the report, Oh explained that the company decided to accelerate the release of Rebel Quad due to internal assessments.

He also emphasized the superior power efficiency of Rebel, stating that it has demonstrated more than four times the power efficiency compared to products from Groq, a competing NPU company in the U.S.

Per a report from Reuters, Rebellions has recently signed a formal merger agreement with Sapeon Korea. The merged entity will retain the name Rebellions, and the combined company is expected to be valued at over 1 trillion Korean won, aiming to strengthen its competitiveness in the global AI chip market.

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• [News] South Korea’s AI Chip Startups Sapeon and Rebellions to Merge
• [News] Korea’s First Semiconductor Unicorn in the Making: AI Chip Firms Sapeon and Rebellions Set to Merge

(Photo credit: Rebellions)

As per a report from Reuters, South Korea’s SK Telecom-backed AI chip startup Sapeon Korea and KT-invested startup Rebellions have officially announced their merger.

The combined entity is expected to be established by the end of 2024, with the merger projected to create a business valued at over KRW 1 trillion (roughly USD 750 million), hinting at a potential challenge to NVIDIA’s leading position in the AI chip market.

As competition in the AI chip market intensifies, Sapeon and Rebellions have formalized their merger. The merger, which was rumored in June according to the Korean Economic Daily, have now been officially agreed upon, with Rebellions’ co-founder and CEO Sunghyun Park set to lead the executive team of the merged entity.

Sapeon and Rebellions are two South Korean chip startups. Rebellions introduced the ATOM chip last year, Korea’s first NPU designed for large language model (LLM) data centers. Meanwhile, Sapeon launched its next-generation AI chip, the X330, in November, enhancing Korea’s competitiveness in the global AI semiconductor market.

The two companies previously noted that they view the next two to three years as a critical opportunity for South Korea to establish a presence in the global AI semiconductor market. Moreover, they also emphasized their commitment to accelerating the formation of the merged entity to capitalize on this pivotal period.

The report by TheElec, citing industry sources, noted that since SK Group will be the majority shareholder of the merged entity, it may prefer TSMC over Samsung Foundry, given that SK hynix and Samsung are rivals in memory chips. Currently, Sapeon uses TSMC as its foundry, whereas Rebellions collaborates with Samsung Foundry.

Read more

• [News] Korea’s First Semiconductor Unicorn in the Making: AI Chip Firms Sapeon and Rebellions Set to Merge

(Photo credit: Rebellions)