“Surprise Merger”… Increasing the Weight of Domestic AI Semiconductors

August 06, 2024

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With domestic AI semiconductor companies Rebellion and Sapion having decided to merge, their future activities in the global AI semiconductor market are expected.

AI semiconductor startup Rebellion and SK Telecom announced on the 12th that they will join forces to establish a leading AI semiconductor company in South Korea.

To this end, the two companies are pursuing a merger between Rebellion, Korea's leading AI semiconductor company, and Sapion Korea, an affiliate of SKT.

This merger resulted from an agreement between the two companies to create a national company that will participate in the global AI infrastructure war through a major integration of domestic AI semiconductor companies.

Currently, the NPU (neural network processing unit) market for AI work is proliferating along with the integration of AI across industries, and competition among global companies to dominate the market is fierce.

Rebellion and SKT view the next two to three years as the “golden time” for South Korea to seize the opportunity in the global AI semiconductor market and have concluded that a rapid merger is necessary. Accordingly, they plan to complete the contract for the merger by the third quarter after going through the necessary procedures such as due diligence and shareholder approval, and launch the integrated corporation within the year.

In addition, the two companies expected that the newly merged corporation would be able to secure competitiveness in the global AI semiconductor market by combining the development capabilities and know-how that Rebellion and Sapion Korea have proven in the NPU market.

Due to the rapidly changing nature of the semiconductor industry, startups are better able to respond to market conditions more quickly than large corporations, so Rebellion, which has successfully written the growth story of AI semiconductor companies, will be responsible for the management of the merged company.

After the merger, SKT, as a strategic investor, plans to actively support the merged company's entry into the global AI semiconductor market and improvement of Korea's AI semiconductor competitiveness.

In addition, KT, a strategic investor in Rebellion, has also agreed to pursue this merger to secure technological sovereignty and create a world-class AI semiconductor company.

Rebellion is an AI semiconductor fabless startup co-founded by CEO Park Sung-hyun and CTO Oh Jin-wook in 2020. Since its founding, it has been growing rapidly, launching two products in the three years since its founding and being recognized for its corporate value of 880 billion won.

In particular, Rebellion's second product, the AI ​​semiconductor 'ATOM', accelerated LLM through the commercialization of data centers for the first time as a domestic NPU last year and is attracting attention as it enters mass production this year. It is currently developing the next-generation AI semiconductor 'REBEL' targeting the large language model market.

Sapion Korea is an AI semiconductor company that was spun off from SKT's internal R&D organization in 2016. After introducing Korea's first AI semiconductor for data centers in 2020, the company expanded its business scope to autonomous driving and edge services through the development of high-performance AI semiconductors, such as unveiling the next-generation AI semiconductor 'X330' in November of last year.

See the full article: https://www.epnc.co.kr/news/articleView.html?idxno=301796