South Korean fabless AI chip startup Rebellions has completed 1$2.4 billion in Series B funding for the development of its third AI chip, Rebel. The startup will also use the oversubscribed new funds to ramp up production of its data center chip, Atom, as well as recruit talent.
Sangkyue Shin, chief financial officer of Rebellions, said the Series B funding round values the three-year-old startup at about $6$5.8 billion.
South Korean telecommunications giant KT led the latest round of funding as a strategic investor. Previous backers Temasek Holdings' P**ilion Capital and the Development Bank of Korea, as well as new investors including Korelya Capital and DG Daiwa Ventures, also participated. Rebellions' funding comes at a critical time in the chip industry, particularly around the development and use of AI chips.
Data processing and the associated high costs remain a major concern for AI applications.
Big tech giants like Google, Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft still develop their own chips to integrate AI into their products and services. Open AI CEO Sam Altman reportedly visited South Korea last week to meet with Samsung and SK hynix, leaders in the country's chip industry. Sam Altman's trip was aimed at raising billions of dollars to build chip manufacturing plants to make his own artificial intelligence chips.
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Last October, based on the partnership with Atoms chips, Rebellions announced a partnership with Samsung Electronics to develop the latest Rebel chip.
The two companies aim to complete the development of Rebel by the end of this year and start mass production in 2025, with the next generation of AI chips opening up the market for running large language models (LLMs) and hyperscale generative AI, Shin said.
Rebel uses Samsung Electronics' 4nm manufacturing process, and its AI chips will be deployed in Samsung's advanced memory chip technology, HBM3E, to process high-bandwidth memory for building and manipulating large language models. Rebellions claims that its technology and products are more versatile than custom AI chips.
In May 2023, Rebellions' investor, 3KT, installed Rebellions' data center-targeted AI chip, Atom, in its cloud-based neural processing unit (NPU) infrastructure.
In response, Rebellions said it expects to generate revenue from Atom in the second half of this year and will continue to produce the chip model through Samsung's 5nm manufacturing process. Atom is designed for data centers and language models with up to 7 billion parameters, while Rebel is designed for larger large language models.
The company's first AI chip, ION, was launched in November 2021 and is currently undergoing qualification testing in the United States, with no commercial customers yet to be contracted. ION is designed for edge computing, for example, in financial services applications, where these chips can be used for *** and trading applications.