South Korean AI startup Rebellions wants to launch alternatives to AI chips offered by market leader Nvidia.
Rebellions CEO Park Sunghyun said the startup’s goal is to, within one to two years, find specific applications that it can offer AI chips that be used instead of those by Nvidia.
Specifically, Rebellions wants to take away Nvidia A100 and L40 chips’ market shares in the area of inference, Park said.
Rebellions was founded in 2020 and has around 90 employees, with 90% of them being engineers.
The startup completed two tape outs __ where a fabless chip company sends its completed chip design to a contract manufacturer __ since then, an impressive feat for a 3-year-old company.
Its first AI chip to be produced next year is called Atom is aimed at data centers and will be supplied to South Korean carrier KT.
Nvidia has segmented its AI chip portfolio well to avoid cannibalization, Park noted.
For most companies, their high-end product with GDDR6 and low-end product with high bandwidth memory can overlap but the US chip giant has successfully avoided this, the CEO said.
Nvidia offers a diverse range of products __ A100, H100, L4, L40, A2, A10, A16, A30, and A40 __ that allows customers to choose the best one for their specific application.
However, as these chips are made for general use, the problem of high power consumption and cost remains.
Rebellions want to offer efficient chips in the low-power inference sector, which big companies like Nvidia can miss out on.
The startup is developing its next-generation server chip called Rebel. The shift to AI semiconductors was like the shift to electric vehicles, Park said, and various AI chip startups will appear to challenge Nvidia.
