South Korean AI chip startup Rebellions is aiming to IPO in the first half of next year in South Korea, with a possibility of subsequently listing in the United States.

South Korean artificial intelligence (AI) chip startup Rebellions co-founder and CEO Park Sunghyun said in an interview on Wednesday that the company plans to go public on the South Korean capital market in the first half of next year, followed by seeking a listing in the US market. He said, "Our current priority is the Korean market. Later, like the plan by SK hynix, we will enter the US market through American Depositary Receipts (ADR)." Established in 2020, Rebellions focuses on AI inference chip field, emphasizing high energy efficiency and high performance, and sells server systems based on its self-developed Rebel100 NPU chip. Park Sunghyun mentioned that Rebellions has started generating actual revenue, and as a result, "we are currently preparing for IPO with the underwriting team from JPMorgan and Samsung Securities." He stated that Rebellions plans to finish all listing documents preparation by the end of this year, and depending on the market situation, initiate an initial public offering (IPO) in the first or second quarter of next year. Rebellions' investors include Saudi Aramco's venture capital arm Wa'ed Ventures, Samsung Electronics, SK hynix, and SK Telecom. In March of this year, Rebellions announced raising $400 million in its latest funding round, with an estimated valuation of around $2.34 billion. In this latest funding round, Korea Growth Investment Fund invested 250 billion Korean won (approximately $165 million). This was the first direct investment under the South Korean government's "K-Nvidia" program, aimed at nurturing a globally competitive chip company to counter the increasing competition in the AI chip industry dominated by American companies. Rebellions is one of the few well-funded South Korean chip startups. The latest funding round in March may give it an advantage when competing against domestic rivals like Furiosa AI Inc. and DeepX Co. Ltd. The company is also seeking global expansion and aiming to challenge AI chip giant NVIDIA Corporation (NVDA.US). In terms of product, Rebellions' Rebel100 AI accelerator is very similar to NVIDIA Corporation's H200 accelerator expected by the end of 2023. According to Rebellions' data, the accelerator can achieve 1 petaFLOP of intense 16-bit floating-point operations, or double the performance in FP8 format. Different from the H200 single-chip computing chip made using Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., Ltd. Sponsored ADR, Rebellions' latest processor adopts a small chip architecture, containing four computation chips manufactured and packaged by Samsung. The processor is equipped with four HBM3e stacks, with a total capacity of 144 GB and an aggregate bandwidth of 4.8 TB/s. The use of smaller computing chips and dependence on Samsung not only helps improve yield but also avoids competition with limited manufacturing and packaging capacity of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., Ltd. Sponsored ADR. Efficiency, standard form factor (such as 19-inch rack mountable), and air cooling are key design points for Rebellions, as this allows the systems to be deployed in existing enterprise data centers, something that NVIDIA Corporation's latest liquid-cooled Rubin GPU cannot achieve. For larger-scale deployments, Rebellions is also developing a product called RebelPod, which can scale from 8 nodes to 128 nodes, with each node containing 8 Rebel100 accelerators connected via 800 Gbps Ethernet. Additionally, in the current situation of tight storage semiconductor supply, Rebellions has an advantage in obtaining storage chips due to Samsung Electronics and SK hynix being its investors. It is understood that Rebellions currently sources HBM from Samsung, but in urgent situations, obtaining production support from SK hynix should not be too difficult.