South Korean start-up Rebellions Inc yesterday launched an artificial intelligence (AI) chip, racing to win government contracts as Seoul seeks a place for local companies in the exploding industry.
The company’s Atom chip is the latest South Korean attempt to challenge global leader Nvidia Corp in the hardware that powers the potentially revolutionary AI technology.
AI is the talk of the tech world, as ChatGPT — a chatbot from Microsoft Corp-backed OpenAI that generates articles, essays, jokes and even poetry — has become the fastest-growing consumer app in history just two months after launch.
Photo: Courtesy of Rebellions Inc via Reuters
Nvidia, a US chip designer, has a commanding share of high-end AI chips, making up about 86 percent of the computing power of the world’s six biggest cloud services as of December last year, Jefferies Group LLC chip analyst Mark Lipacis said.
The South Korean government wants to foster a domestic industry, investing more than US$800 million over the next five years for research and development in a bid to lift the market share of South Korean AI chips in domestic data centers from essentially zero to 80 percent by 2030.
“It’s hard to catch up to Nvidia, which is so far ahead in general-purpose AI chips,” Korea Institute for Industrial Economics and Trade senior researcher Kim Yang-paeng said. “But it’s not set in stone, because AI chips can carry out different functions and there aren’t set boundaries or metrics.”
Rebellions’ Atom is designed to excel at running computer vision and chatbot AI applications.
Because it targets specific tasks rather than doing a wide range, the chip consumes only about 20 percent of the power of an Nvidia A100 chip on those tasks, Rebellions cofounder and chief executive Park Sung-hyun said.
A100 is the most popular chip for AI workloads, powerful enough to create — in industry lingo, “train” — the AI models. Atom, designed by Rebellions and manufactured by South Korean giant Samsung Electronics Co, does not do training.
While countries such as Taiwan, China, France, Germany and the US have extensive plans to support their semiconductor companies, the South Korean government is rare in singling out AI chips for a concentrated push.
Seoul is to put out a notice this month for two data centers, called neural processing unit farms, with only domestic chipmakers allowed to bid, an official at the South Korean Ministry of Science and Information Communications Technology said.
In a country whose firms supply half the world’s memory chips, the authorities want to create a market that can be a test bed for AI chipmakers, aiming to foster global competitors.
“The government is twisting the arm of the data centers and telling them: ‘Hey, use these chips,’” said Park, a former Morgan Stanley engineer.
Without such support, data centers and their customers would likely stick with Nvidia chips, he said.
Sapeon Korea Inc also plans to participate in the project, the SK Telecom Co subsidiary said.
FuriosaAI, backed by South Korea’s top search engine Naver Corp and state-run Korea Development Bank, said it would also bid.
“There’s a lot of momentum behind Nvidia’s developments. These start-ups have got to build momentum, so that will take time,” Gartner Inc analyst Alan Priestley said. “But government incentives such as what’s happening in Korea could well affect the market share within Korea.”
Rebellions would seek to participate in the government project in a consortium with KT Corp — a big South Korean telecom, cloud and data center operator — in the hopes of weaning Nvidia customers off the US supplier.
“Amid high dependence on foreign GPUs [graphics processing units] globally, the cooperation between KT and Rebellions will allow us to have an ‘AI full stack’ that encompasses software and hardware based on domestic technology,” KT vice president Bae Han-chul said.
Rebellions declined to give a forecast for its AI chip venture. It has raised 122 billion won (US$95.47 million), including 30 billion won from KT in a funding round joined by Singapore’s Temasek Pavilion Capital and a 10 billion won grant from the South Korean government.
With this year’s Semicon Taiwan trade show set to kick off on Wednesday, market attention has turned to the mass production of advanced packaging technologies and capacity expansion in Taiwan and the US. With traditional scaling reaching physical limits, heterogeneous integration and packaging technologies have emerged as key solutions. Surging demand for artificial intelligence (AI), high-performance computing (HPC) and high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips has put technologies such as chip-on-wafer-on-substrate (CoWoS), integrated fan-out (InFO), system on integrated chips (SoIC), 3D IC and fan-out panel-level packaging (FOPLP) at the center of semiconductor innovation, making them a major focus at this year’s trade show, according
DEBUT: The trade show is to feature 17 national pavilions, a new high for the event, including from Canada, Costa Rica, Lithuania, Sweden and Vietnam for the first time The Semicon Taiwan trade show, which opens on Wednesday, is expected to see a new high in the number of exhibitors and visitors from around the world, said its organizer, SEMI, which has described the annual event as the “Olympics of the semiconductor industry.” SEMI, which represents companies in the electronics manufacturing and design supply chain, and touts the annual exhibition as the most influential semiconductor trade show in the world, said more than 1,200 enterprises from 56 countries are to showcase their innovations across more than 4,100 booths, and that the event could attract 100,000 visitors. This year’s event features 17
SEMICONDUCTOR SERVICES: A company executive said that Taiwanese firms must think about how to participate in global supply chains and lift their competitiveness Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) yesterday said it expects to launch its first multifunctional service center in Pingtung County in the middle of 2027, in a bid to foster a resilient high-tech facility construction ecosystem. TSMC broached the idea of creating a center two or three years ago when it started building new manufacturing capacity in the US and Japan, the company said. The center, dubbed an “ecosystem park,” would assist local manufacturing facility construction partners to upgrade their capabilities and secure more deals from other global chipmakers such as Intel Corp, Micron Technology Inc and Infineon Technologies AG, TSMC said. It
EXPORT GROWTH: The AI boom has shortened chip cycles to just one year, putting pressure on chipmakers to accelerate development and expand packaging capacity Developing a localized supply chain for advanced packaging equipment is critical for keeping pace with customers’ increasingly shrinking time-to-market cycles for new artificial intelligence (AI) chips, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) said yesterday. Spurred on by the AI revolution, customers are accelerating product upgrades to nearly every year, compared with the two to three-year development cadence in the past, TSMC vice president of advanced packaging technology and service Jun He (何軍) said at a 3D IC Global Summit organized by SEMI in Taipei. These shortened cycles put heavy pressure on chipmakers, as the entire process — from chip design to mass
RSS