Rebellions Inc., a Seoul-based developer of artificial intelligence chips, has raised $124 million in funding to support its engineering efforts.

The startup announced the investment on Monday. The raise was led by KT, South Korea’s second largest wireless carrier and a Rebellions customer. TechCrunch reported that Korea Development Bank participated as well along with several other institutional backers. 

Rebellions, which is now valued at $658 million, sells two processors called Ion and Atom. Both are optimized to run AI applications. However, they’re based on different manufacturing technologies and target two separate sets of use cases.

Ion, which is made using a seven-nanometer process, can perform 4 trillion computations per second. It provides that performance when crunching data in the half-precision floating-point format, which is commonly used to store information processed by AI models. Ion also supports bfloat16, a second, performance-optimized data format optimized for the same task.

Rebellions says that the chip can be used to power edge computing devices with onboard AI software. Additionally, Ion promises to speed up high-frequency trading applications running in data centers. Rebellions offers a PCIe accelerator card, LightTrader, that includes four Ion chips and can be installed in standard server closets.

The company’s other AI processor is called Atom. According to Rebellions, it’s based on a more advanced five-nanometer process and provides eight times the peak performance of Ion. The chip is designed to power large language models with up to 7 billion parameters.

Atom includes a feature that allows data center operators to split it into multiple, isolated partitions. Those partitions function as virtual processors can perform up to 16 different computing tasks side-by-side. The feature is primarily geared towards cloud providers, which often use a single chip to power multiple customers’ virtual machines.

Rebellions told TechCrunch that NT, the lead investor in the new round, is using Atom to power parts of its data center infrastructure. The chipmaker expects to start generating revenue from the processor in the second half of the year.

It will use the proceeds from the funding round to scale production of Atom. Additionally, the capital will help the company finance the development of a third AI processor called Rebel. It’s designing the latter chip in collaboration with Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd., which will also manufacture it using its four-nanometer process.

Atom, Rebellions’ current flagship chip, uses a type of RAM called GDDR6 to store the information it ingests. The company’s next-generation Rebel processor is set to feature HBM3E, a faster, more expensive memory technology that also powers Nvidia Corp.’s latest H200 graphics card. It says its upcoming chip will be capable of running large language models with more than seven billion parameters. 

The company and Samsung reportedly expect to complete the development effort by year’s end. They plan to start mass producing Rebel in 2025.

Image: Rebellions