South Korean startup Rebellions wants to challenge NVIDIA in AI Chip Industry

Rebellions Inc, a South Korean startup, launched  ATOM, an artificial intelligence (AI) chip, on Monday. The ATOM chip is the latest move of Korea in challenging Nvidia Corp as the global leader in the hardware that enables potentially game-changing AI technology.

The South Korean government is investing over $800 million in the next five years. The government wants to raise the market share of Korean AI chips to 80% by 2023. AI has received incredible attention since Open AI’s ChatGPT emerged. ChatGPT is the fastest-growing consumer app in history in its two months of existence.

“It’s hard to catch up to Nvidia, which is so far ahead in general-purpose AI chips. But it’s not set in stone because AI chips can carry out different functions, and there aren’t set boundaries or metrics.”

Kim Yang-Paeng, Senior Researcher at the Korea Institute for Industrial Economics and Trade.

Through groundbreaking vision, Nvidia has skyrocketed to the top of AI and chip design, becoming a market leader with an impressive 86% share across six prominent cloud-computing providers globally.

Although Rebellions designed ATOM, it was manufactured by Samsung. Rebellions’ ATOM chip promises to revolutionize AI application performance, delivering targeted computer vision and chatbot functionality. According to Rebellions chief executive Park Sunghyun, the chip utilizes only 20% of the power consumption required by Nvidia’s A100. The A100 chip is the most popular choice for tackling AI workloads with ease. While the A100 chip usually “trains” the AI models, the ATOM needs no training

South Korea’s commitment to AI

South Korea is taking a unique position in the global race for AI innovation – investing heavily to foster advanced chip-making capabilities. The country has set its sight to go beyond leaders such as China, Taiwan, the United States, Germany, and France, who have extensive support for semiconductor companies. South Korean authorities want to create a burgeoning market for AI chipmakers. Already half of the world’s memory chips come from tech-savvy firms.

This month, Seoul will announce an opportunity for two South Korean chipmakers to lead the way in a futuristic technology shift – neural processing unit farms. The Ministry of Science and ICT has revealed that domestic providers may compete for this cutting-edge project.

Rebellion AI plans 

Some companies participating in the project include Sapeon Project Inc, SK Telecom Co, and FuriosaAI. Rebellions is taking on the government project partnered with one of Korea’s leading technology companies, KT Corp as they aim to offer an alternative for customers looking to move away from using the U.S.-supplied Nvidia products in their systems.

“Amid high dependence on foreign GPUs (graphics processing units) globally, the cooperation between KT and Rebellions will allow us to have an ‘AI full stack’ that encompasses software and hardware based on domestic technology,”

Bae Han-chul, KT Vice President

Rebellions secured 122 billion won in funding – including 30 billion won from telecom giant KT as well as a 10-billion-won grant from the government of South Korea along with backing by Singapore’s Temasek Pavilion Capital. However, Rebellion chose not to share any forecasts at this time.

The featured image was taken from Rebellions Inc