South Korea’s Nvidia wannabe, AI chip start-up Rebellions, to begin mass production of NPUs, backed by Samsung
- Rebellions, a fabless AI chip company co-founded by five South Korean engineers, is viewed as the country’s best hope to rival Nvidia in AI inference
- While the start-up’s first product was made by TSMC, the coming Atom NPU will be mass-produced by Samsung Electronics
A version of this article was first published by The Korea Times in a partnership with the South China Morning Post.
In an office building in southern Seoul, a dozen chips were laid side by side on shelves, each next to their own electric fan to cool them down as they operate.
Regarded as the next generation of AI chips, NPUs are optimised to perform so-called simultaneous matrix operations, which give them a step up in the AI method known as deep learning, compared with general-purpose central processing units (CPUs) and GPUs.
Rebellions, a fabless AI chip company co-founded by five South Korean engineers in 2020, has been viewed as the country’s best hope to rival Nvidia in AI inference – the process of running live data through an AI model to make a prediction or solve a task, as opposed to training.
Park Sung-hyun, CEO and co-founder of Rebellions, said in a recent interview with The Korea Times that Atom is set to be mass-produced with Samsung Electronics’ 5-nanometre technology in the first half of this year.