KB News Desk
Rebellions, FuriosaAI set to challenge Nvidia
By Nam Hyun-woo
Anticipation is growing over the market value of Korea’s domestic artificial intelligence (AI) processor manufacturers, as they gear up to compete with established leaders such as Nvidia and other global giants, fueled by substantial investments from major technology firms.
Neural processing unit (NPU) maker Rebellions signed an official contract to merge with rival processor maker Sapeon Korea, SK Telecom, the largest shareholder of Sapeon Korea, announced on Sunday — just two months after the merger plan was proposed.
As part of the agreement, 2.4 Rebellions shares will be exchanged with 1 Sapeon Korea share. The merged company’s current value is 1.14 trillion won ($851.2 million).
Rebellions is currently moving forward with an initial public offering (IPO) and appointed Samsung Securities as its lead manager last month. Brokerages have reportedly valued Rebellions’ post-IPO worth at 2 to 3 trillion won, but industry experts estimate it could potentially reach up to 4 trillion won.
Rebellions is a fabless AI semiconductor company co-founded in 2020 by CEO Park Sung-hyun and chief technology officer Oh Jin-wook. Park served as a researcher and engineer at Intel, Samsung and Space X, while Oh was a research employee at IBM.
Rebellions focuses on NPU, which is a chip designed specifically for running AI tasks more efficiently than a graphics processing unit (GPU), which is the mainstream processor for AI chipsets now. GPUs are versatile and capable of handling various parallel tasks, including AI, but NPUs are made to process AI workloads, making them particularly suited for tasks like deep learning and neural network processing.
Rebellions has launched two products after its establishment, with its second offering, ATOM, entering mass production this year. The company is now developing REBEL, its next-generation model.
The merged firm’s major investors will include a number of big-name global financial players and Korea’s two largest telecom companies, SK Telecom and KT.
Reportedly, Rebellions is in talks with a number of global data center companies, with the goal of supplying products within this year. Since September last year, IBM has been testing Rebellions’ ATOM, while KT has already selected the company as the partner for its data center projects.
SK Telecom is focusing its resources on AI services and is optimistic that Rebellions will be involved in several AI projects that the company is pursuing.
Another Korean AI accelerator chip company, FuriosaAI, is also gaining attention from investors with its IPO bid.
The company selected Mirae Asset Securities as its lead manager in April and is engaging with a number of financial investors. Reportedly, the company is currently in the pre-IPO stage to raise 80 billion won. If this goal is met, its value could reach 760 billion won.
FuriosaAI is an AI fabless semiconductor company established in 2017 by CEO June Paik, who worked as an engineer for AMD and Samsung Electronics.
The company’s flagship product is WARBOY, a high-performance data center accelerator. In February, Taiwanese hardware giant ASUS announced that it decided to supply servers equipped with WARBOY to data center companies. Customers purchasing ASUS servers will have the option to choose WARBOY alongside products from Intel or Nvidia.
FuriosaAI plans to showcase its next-generation AI chip, Renegade (RNGD), at the AI Hardware & Edge Summit in San Jose next month. RNGD will be powered by HBM chips supplied by SK hynix and will have advantages in price and power efficiencies compared to similar products from Nvidia.
The market assumes that FuriosaAI will likely make its debut on the stock market in the second half of next year. Currently, its investors include Korea Development Bank, Naver, DSC Investment and other financial investors.
