At a press conference marking the 5th anniversary of the company’s founding, held on the 16th at Rebellions’ headquarters in Seongnam, Gyeonggi Province, CEO Park Sung-hyun (in photo) declared the company’s ambition “to emerge as a challenger to Nvidia in the global artificial intelligence (AI) semiconductor market.” Rebellions aims to leverage the performance-per-watt advantage of its domestically developed high‑performance, high‑efficiency neural processing units (NPUs) to overtake Nvidia’s graphics processing units (GPUs) and expand its presence in the AI semiconductor market.

Rebellions is the first AI semiconductor unicorn in Korea (a startup valued at KRW 1 trillion or more). It has attracted a cumulative investment of KRW 650 billion from Samsung, SK, KT, Aramco, ARM, and others.

Park stressed, “AI semiconductors are an industry that requires long‑term investment rather than expecting short‑term results,” adding, “Google’s Tensor Processing Unit (TPU), which has recently received favorable reviews, took 10 years just to develop and is now in its seventh version.” He went on to express confidence, saying, “Rebellions’ products can likewise grow into the second and third TPUs.”

Rebellions has developed its next‑generation NPU, “RebelQuad,” which incorporates 5th‑generation High Bandwidth Memory (HBM), HBM3E. This product is currently undergoing performance testing with major U.S. AI companies. According to the company, RebelQuad delivers performance on par with Nvidia’s flagship GPUs, but its performance‑per‑watt is 2.4 times higher than that of Nvidia’s high‑performance AI chip “H200,” while its power consumption is about half.

Park also expressed regret that a substantial portion of government infrastructure investment has been focused on securing GPUs. He said, “If the government and large corporations would invest even one‑tenth of the budget they are putting into purchasing 260,000 Nvidia GPUs in Korea’s AI semiconductor industry, it would open up a path forward.” The 260,000 Nvidia GPUs that the Korean government and private companies have agreed to purchase are estimated to be worth around KRW 14 trillion.

Park founded Rebellions after working at Intel and SpaceX and then returning to Korea. He said, “I judged that the powerful semiconductor infrastructure built by Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix, together with the design capabilities of Korean engineers, provides the foundation to create a global AI semiconductor company.” In response to a question about listing plans, Park stated, “We plan to list on the domestic stock market first, and ultimately aim for a Nasdaq listing as well.”

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