(Bloomberg) — Rebellions Inc. secures $124 million from investors including KT Corporation to accelerate development of next-generation AI chips, highlighting growing interest in the hardware that powers artificial intelligence. I made it.
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The South Korean startup has completed wireless carrier-led Series B funding at a valuation of more than $650 million. Singapore's Pavilion Capital, KT's data center subsidiary KT Cloud Co., Ltd., and Shinhan Venture Investment Co., Ltd. participated in the financing, the company said in a statement. New backers of the deal included France's Koreyla Capital and Japan's DGDV.
Rebellions is one of several startups trying to enter the semiconductor market to train and run AI, from California-based Groq Inc. to Toronto's Tenstorrent Inc. and established leader Nvidia Corp. , competing with other startups. From the United States to China, companies are developing advanced AI. This wave of activity was fueled by the advent of OpenAI's ChatGPT.
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The South Korean startup plans to use the new funding to expand jobs and accelerate development with Samsung Electronics of its next-generation AI chip, called Rebel, designed to run large-scale language models. South Korea has allocated approximately 826 billion won ($6,18). The company aims to support domestic AI chip designers until 2030 and build a foundation that goes beyond the memory semiconductors currently dominated by Samsung and SK Hynix.
While Rebellions and its allies are designing silicon focused on specialized tasks like computer vision and chatbots, Nvidia's flagship still does the heavy lifting of training language models at scale. Domestically, it competes with search giant Naver Inc. and FuriosaAI, which is backed by the state-run Korea Industrial Bank. His Sapeon Inc., backed by SK Telecom Co. and SK Hynix, is also a Korean challenger.
Rebellions' existing backers include Korea Industrial Bank and internet conglomerate Kakao. The company, founded in 2020, relies on Samsung to manufacture its chips using 4-nanometer technology.
(Updated startup rating in second paragraph)
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