AI chip firms Rebellions and Sapeon to merge
South Korean artificial intelligence semiconductor companies Rebellions and Sapeon Korea have finalised plans to become a single entity.
The companies are both active in the flourishing AI chip space. Sapeon Korea was spun-off from SK Telecom's internal research and development division in 2016. It launched an AI chip for data centres in 2020, and revealed its latest offering, the 'X330' AI semiconductor, last year.
Meanwhile Rebellions is a fabless AI chip firm best known for its ATOM product. It closed a USD 124 million Series B in February positioning itself as a low-cost alternative to the giant incumbents of the AI chip space such as Nvidia, Google, Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft.
Rebellions has been co-developing its latest product, Rebel, with Samsung and will use the latter firm's high bandwidth memory chips and its 4-nanometer chip manufacturing process.
The merger should strengthen both companies at a time when the neural processing unit (NPU) market is expanding rapidly. Rebellions will manage the operations of the merged entity, which should complete in Q3. Financial terms of the transaction were not disclosed.
