An artificial intelligence chip startup from South Korea, Rebellions, has announced its intention to go public domestically in the first half of next year, with plans to subsequently pursue a listing in the United States. The company's co-founder and CEO, Park Sunghyun, shared these plans during an interview on Wednesday.
Park Sunghyun stated that the company's immediate priority is the Korean market. Following that, Rebellions may seek access to U.S. markets through American Depositary Receipts, a strategy similar to one planned by SK Hynix.
Founded in 2020, Rebellions focuses on AI inference chips, emphasizing high energy efficiency and performance. It sells server systems based on its in-house developed Rebel100 NPU chip. The CEO noted that Rebellions has already begun generating revenue, which is why it is now working with underwriting teams from JPMorgan and Samsung Securities to prepare for its initial public offering.
The company aims to complete all necessary IPO documentation by the end of this year. Depending on market conditions, the public offering is scheduled to launch in either the first or second quarter of 2025.
Rebellions is backed by a notable group of investors, including Saudi Aramco's venture capital arm Wa'ed Ventures, Samsung Electronics, SK Hynix, and SK Telecom. In March of this year, the company raised $4 million in its latest funding round, achieving a valuation of approximately $2.34 billion.
This recent investment round included a contribution of 250 billion won (about $1.65 million) from South Korea's National Growth Fund. This marks the first direct investment under the government's "K-Nvidia" initiative, a program designed to foster a globally competitive domestic chip company to contend with the intensifying competition in the AI chip sector, currently dominated by U.S. firms.
Rebellions stands as one of the few well-funded chip startups in South Korea. The substantial capital from its March funding round could provide it with a competitive edge against domestic rivals such as Furiosa AI Inc. and DeepX Co. Ltd. The company is also pursuing global expansion and aims to challenge the dominance of AI chip giant NVIDIA Corp (NASDAQ: NVDA).
Product and Technology Focus
In terms of its product lineup, Rebellions' Rebel100 AI accelerator bears a strong resemblance to NVIDIA's H200 accelerator released in late 2023. According to company data, this accelerator can achieve 1 petaFLOP of dense 16-bit floating-point operations, or double that performance using the FP8 format.
A key differentiator from NVIDIA's H200, which uses a monolithic compute chip manufactured by TSMC, is that Rebellions' latest processor employs a chiplet architecture. It integrates four compute chips, which are manufactured and packaged by Samsung.
The processor is equipped with four HBM3e stacks, offering a total capacity of 144 GB and an aggregate bandwidth of 4.8 TB/s. This reliance on smaller compute chips and Samsung's manufacturing capabilities not only helps improve yield rates but also avoids competition for TSMC's limited fabrication and packaging capacity.
Design and Deployment Strategy
High efficiency, a standard form factor such as a 19-inch chassis, and air-cooling are central to Rebellions' design philosophy. These features allow its systems to be deployed in existing enterprise data centers—a capability not offered by NVIDIA's latest generation of liquid-cooled Rubin GPUs.
For larger-scale deployments, Rebellions is developing a product named RebelPod. This system can scale from 8 nodes to 128 nodes, with each node containing 8 Rebel100 accelerators interconnected via 800 Gbps Ethernet.
Supply Chain Advantages
Amid the current tight supply of memory chips, Rebellions holds a strategic advantage due to its investors, Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix. This relationship facilitates access to critical components like High Bandwidth Memory. Currently, Rebellions procures HBM from Samsung, but securing production capacity support from SK Hynix in case of urgent needs is expected to be relatively straightforward.