Rebellions is a South Korean fabless AI chip startup, building Rebel AI chip with Samsung

Rebellions is a South Korean fabless AI chip startup, closing a new Series B round of funding to help develop its third AI chip, Rebel.

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The new funding round and $124 million of new investment will help make its new Rebel AI chip, with Rebellions using the new funding to ramp up production of its new data center-focused chip, Atom, and for hiring new staff. Rebellions is now valued at around $658 million (880 billion KRW) post-money, according to Sungkyue Shin, the CEO of Rebellions, who spoke with TechCrunch.

South Korean telecom giant KT led the latest round in funding for Rebellions as a strategic investor. Previous investors include Temasek's Pavilion Capital and Korea Development Bank, who chipped in this round, as well as new investors, including Korelya Capital and DG Daiwa Ventures.

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NVIDIA is currently absolutely dominating the AI GPU market, but there are companies jumping into the race as well as its GeForce competitor in Radeon-maker AMD with the launch of its new Instinct MI300X AI GPU, and other companies that are making AI processors for various AI applications.

We've got Apple, Amazon, Google, and Microsoft all developing or already have their own AI processors baked into their products and services. OpenAI boss Sam Altman has also been reportedly been in South Korea recently, meeting with tech giants like Samsung and SK hynix. OpenAI has been raising billions of dollars to set up its own chip fabrication facilities, where it will make its own AI processors.

Rebellions announced back in October 2023 that it was in partnership with Samsung Electronics to develop its new Rebel AI chip after teaming up to make its Atoms chips. The two South Korean companies are looking at completing the development of its Rebel AI chip by the end of the year, with eyes on 2025 for mass production.

• Read more: OpenAI founder Sam Altman is building a network of AI chip fabrication plants
• Read more: Samsung's new HBM3e 'Shinebolt' memory: 50% perf boost
• Read more: Samsung hoarding 2.5D packaging equipment, preparing for NVIDIA's next-gen AI GPU

Rebellions CEO Sungkyue Shin told TechCrunch that Rebel will be using Samsung's new 4nm fabrication process and that its new Rebel AI chip will be using Samsung's advanced memory chip technology, its new HBM3e memory, which was designed for high bandwidth memory situations for building and operating large language models (LLMs). Rebellions' next-gen Rebel AI chip will be aimed at the generative AI market, running large language models and hyperscalers.

Rebellions will be cooperating with Samsung from the co-development and chip design through to mass production of the next-gen Rebel AI chip.