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.
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