South Korean startup Rebellions.ai launched its artificial intelligence chip on Monday. With this launch, the company that builds AI accelerators to bridge the gap between silicon architectures and machine learning algorithms, puts itself in the AI race and aspires to grab government contracts. 

Going on an ambitious route, Rebellions.ai, a Seoul-based company, founded in 2020, launched its latest ATOM chip to compete against NVIDIA, the American corporation that builds GPU and SoC products, which is the world’s 8th most valuable company by market cap. 

Park Sunghyun, the co-founder of Rebellions.ai, said that the ATOM chip is built to run computer vision and AI chatbot applications. Compared to an NVIDIA A100 chip, the ATOM chip consumes only 20% of the power consumed by the former as it targets specific tasks rather than a large range.  

Kim Yang-Paeng, a senior researcher at Korea Institute for Industrial Economics and Trade, believes that, though it is hard to catch up with NVIDIA in the AI chips race, the versatility of AI chips allows multiple functions and that there “aren’t set boundaries or metrics”. NVIDIA Corp stocks have climbed 52% in 2023 and are expected to grow further. 

The South Korean government wishes to bolster research and development in the AI chip industry as it looks to improve its market share in domestic data centres. The government will invest close to $800 million over the next five years, and the demand for AI chips is set to take up 33% of the overall system chip demand by 2030. 

To maintain a strong AI ecosystem, countries must have access to semiconductors to support in-house data centres and public cloud computing, as a shortage of semiconductors will disrupt the flow. The US, China and Taiwan are established players in the semiconductor market, and Japan and Korea are slowly building their space. The global semiconductor manufacturing capacity share of South Korea reached 21% in 2022 from zero in 1990. With Rebellions.ai working on AI chips, the race to establish itself as a global player is seamlessly set. The company has raised over 112 billion won to date.