Rebel-Quad is the second generation of Rebellions product and consists of four Rebel AI chips. The Korean company, Rebellion, is looking for rival companies like AI chips' Nvidia.
Rebellion
The rebellion of South Korean artificial intelligence chip startups has raised funds from tech giant Samsung and targets funding rounds of up to $200 million over the public list, the company's executives told CNBC on Tuesday.
Last year, the Rebellion merged with another startup in South Korea called Sapeon to create a company positioned as one of the nation's promising rivals. nvidia.
The rebellion is currently raising funds and is targeting $150 million to $200 million, startup chief financial officer Sungkyue Shin told CNBC on Tuesday.
Samsung's investment in last week's rebellion was part of it, Singh said, but he refused to say how much the tech giant was poured into it.
Since its founding in 2020, the rebellion has raised $220 million, Singh added.
The current funding round is ongoing, and Shin said the rebellion is talking to current investors and South Korea investors to take part in the global capital raise. The rebellion has several big investors including the Korean chip giant Sk Hynixtelecommunications company SK Telecom South Korean News Agency and Saudi Arabia's oil giant Aramco.
The rebellion was valued at $1 billion in the end. Singh said the current funding round drives valuations above $1 billion but refused to give them a specific number.
The Rebellion is aiming for an initial public offering after the funding round is over.
“Our master plan is open to the public,” Singh said.
Rebellion designs chips that focus on AI reasoning rather than training. Inference is very similar to the answers generated by popular chatbots when pre-trained AI models interpret live data and produce results.
With the support of major Korean companies and investors, the rebellion wants a global play that it looks like it's a challenge nvidia and AMD Like many other startups in the reasoning space.
Samsung collaboration
The Rebellion is working with Samsung to bring the second-generation chip, the Rebels, to the market. Samsung owns a chip manufacturing industry, also known as Foundry. Four rebel chips are combined to create a rebel army. Rebels are the products that will ultimately be sold. A rebellion spokesperson said the chips will be released later this year.
The funds will be partially directed towards product development in the rebellion. The Rebellion is currently testing its chips and will eventually be produced on a large scale by Samsung.
“The initial results were very promising,” Rebellion CEO Sunghyun Park told CNBC on Tuesday.
Park said Samsung invested in the rebellion because of the good results it has produced so far.
Samsung manufactures Rebellions semiconductors using four nanometer processes. This is one of the cutting edge chipmaking nodes. For comparison, Nvidia's current Blackwell chip uses a 4 nanometer process from Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. The Rebellion also uses Samsung's high bandwidth memory known as the HBM3E. This type of memory is stacked and is required to handle large data processing loads.
It could turn out to be a strategic victory for Samsung. Samsung is very far from TSMC in terms of market share in its foundry business. Samsung is trying to boost its chipmaking division. Samsung Electronics recently signed a $16.5 billion deal to supply semiconductors to Tesla.
If the rebellion can find a large customer base, this could potentially make Samsung a major customer in its casting business.
