Korean Fabless AI Chip Company Rebellions to Release REBEL in 2024, Merge with SAPEON Korea

TapTechNews August 23rd news, according to the Korean media ZDNetKorea report, the chief technology officer of the Korean fabless AI chip design company Rebellions, OhJin-wook, said in an interview that its next-generation AI NPU chip REBEL is expected to be released within 2024.

REBEL is specifically designed to accelerate large language models and multimodal models, and it adopts the process and memory combination of Samsung + Samsung: Samsung's 4nm process + Samsung's HBM3E 12GB memory. In addition, the REBEL chip will also support 800 Gigabit Ethernet.

The REBEL family includes two products, namely REBEL-Single based on a single die and REBEL-Quad composed of 4 dies, which are equipped with 1 and 4 HBM3E 12GB memory stacks respectively, and REBEL-Quad can accelerate large models with a parameter scale of 175B+.

OhJin-wook said that the company plans to release REBEL-Single within the year; as for the larger REBEL-Quad, thanks to the active support of Samsung Electronics, the expected launch time will be advanced from around 2026 to early 2025.

Rebellions signed a final merger agreement with another AI semiconductor design company SAPEON Korea under the South Korean SK Group on the 18th of this month.

After the completion of the merger, SAPEON Korea becomes the surviving entity but the name is changed to Rebellions, and at the same time the new Rebellions will be led by the current Rebellions CEO ParkSung-hyun. The valuation of the new Rebellions is expected to exceed 1 trillion Korean won (TapTechNews note: currently about 5.33 billion yuan).

OhJin-wook said on this:

SAPEON and Rebellions are both NPU development companies, but the two companies have different business models and partners, so both sides have different perspectives. The merged new enterprise will combine the advantages of both parties to develop better solutions.