[Edaily Reporter Kim Hyun-ah ] South Korean AI semiconductor fabless company Rebellion is accelerating its push into the global AI infrastructure market.

SKTelecom(017670) With the upcoming supply of its second-generation neural processing units (NPUs) for AI infrastructure and other applications, the company is expanding its foundation for overseas market entry through invitations from SoftBank, securing global investors, and validating the performance of its domestically developed AI semiconductors.

Rebellion has secured cumulative investments of over 1 trillion won and achieved a pre-IPO valuation of approximately 3.4 trillion won, establishing itself as the most prominent AI semiconductor startup in Korea.

In a recent interview with E-Daily, Park Sung-hyun, CEO of Rebellion, emphasized, “While various opinions may arise during competition in Korea, the criteria for evaluating companies in the global market are different,” adding, “Overseas investors and customers place the highest importance on who is actually using the product and what business results it is delivering, rather than marketing slogans.”

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Invited Directly by SoftBank”… Global Market Focuses on Power Efficiency

A prime example illustrating Rebellion’s changing global standing is its recent invitation from Japan’s

SoftBank

. SoftBank, an investor in and customer of SambaNova—a leading AI semiconductor fabless company—met with Rebellion to explore business collaboration in the rapidly expanding AI inference market.

The invitation was so sudden that he even rescheduled his planned vacation in Gangneung to board a flight to Japan. CEO Park explained, “SoftBank was personally reviewing companies it was keeping an eye on in the global AI semiconductor market, and Rebellion was one of them,” adding, “It was an opportunity to be evaluated alongside global AI semiconductor companies such as Tenstorrent and Etched.”

He said, “The key focus in the AI semiconductor market these days is not simply peak performance, but power efficiency and cost competitiveness in inference environments,” adding, “I believe this is the result of Rebellion’s strategic direction aligning with the demands of the global market.”

“Collaboration with SK, KTCorporation, Samsung, and Hynix

Is a Source of

Differentiated Competitiveness”

Rebellion’s ability to secure competitiveness in the global market stems from its collaborative relationships with major domestic ICT companies.

Currently, Rebellion is continuing investment and business partnerships with SKTelecom, KTCorporation, SamsungElectronics, SK hynix, and others. It is producing AI semiconductors through Samsung Foundry, and its second-generation NPU (Rebel 100) is scheduled to be supplied to SKTelecom’s AI infrastructure business and other projects.

CFO Shin Sung-kyu stated, “The order volume secured last year was approximately 32 billion won,” adding, “Market interest is so high that our supply capacity is insufficient to meet current customer demand.”

CEO Park emphasized, “Our connections with leading domestic companies through various channels are a key competitive advantage unique to Rebellion,” adding, “We believe it is more important to demonstrate our capabilities through actual deliveries and business results rather than just words.”

Rebellion has also recently demonstrated the competitiveness of its domestically produced NPU-based AI infrastructure. The company successfully ran SKTelecom’s proprietary AI foundation model, “A.X K1,” using its own AI semiconductor server, “RebelServer.” This marks the first instance of processing a 500B-class hyper-large AI model—with over 500 billion parameters—in a single-server environment.

Until now, hyper-scale AI models have been built primarily on high-performance GPU servers due to their massive computational demands. Rebellion explained that this demonstration showed that infrastructure based on domestically developed NPUs can serve as an alternative that reduces costs and power consumption.

Technical Capabilities Confirmed in K-Perf… “Running a Super-Large AI Model on a Single Card”

Rebellion also demonstrated its technological competitiveness in a recent performance verification of Korean AI semiconductors.

In the “K-Perf” pilot evaluation conducted by the Ministry of Science and ICT, the KoreaInformation&Communication Technology Association (TTA), and the Institute for Information & Communications Technology Planning & Evaluation (IITP), Rebellion used the R100 to run OpenAI’s “GPT-oss-120B” on a single-card environment.

A key highlight was the processing of this ultra-large language model—with approximately 120 billion parameters—in a BF16 precision environment.

CEO Park stated, “Successfully running a super-large model stably in a single-chip environment demonstrates our competitiveness in real-world inference scenarios,” adding, “This has served as an opportunity to prove that domestically produced AI semiconductors can compete in the global market.”

He continued, “We will actively participate in national-level projects, such as the 250 billion won domestic NPU demonstration project, to contribute to the growth of the domestic AI semiconductor ecosystem.”

“Beyond Chips, Toward an AI Infrastructure Company”…Ultimate Goal Is the Global Stage

Rebellion has set a goal to grow beyond being a mere NPU supplier into an AI

infrastructure

company encompassing servers and data centers.

The recent acquisition of Squeezebits, a company specializing in AI model lightweighting and optimization, is also part of a strategy to secure both hardware and software capabilities simultaneously. The collaboration with Taiwan’s Pegatron on server modules is another move aimed at expanding the AI server and data center markets.

Regarding the company’s initial public offering (IPO) plans, CEO Park stated, “Since we have received domestic investment, such as from the National Growth Fund, our commitment to the Korean capital market is also important.” He added, however, “As a founder, I have a dream of one day listing on the Nasdaq or the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) to compete with top-tier global companies.”

He continued, “Watching SK hynix ring the opening bell at New York’s Times Square recently, I saw the potential for Korean companies to gain recognition on the global stage,” emphasizing, “I want to create such a precedent in the AI semiconductor sector as well.”

◇CEO Park Sung-hyun
Born in 1984; graduated from Gyeongnam Science High School; earned a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from KAIST in 2006; earned a Ph.D. in Computer Science from MIT in 2014; served as a Senior Research Scientist at Intel Labs in 2016; served as a Starlink ASIC Design Engineer at SpaceX in 2018; served as Vice President at Morgan Stanley in 2020; and became CEO of Rebellion in 2020.