The fresh merger has created the merger of South Korea's first AI-chip unicorn, and Rebellions head Sunghyun Park is preparing the next generation of labor-saving leverage chips that make the young company suitable for the industry's giants.
This story is part of Forbes’ report on South Korea’s richest 2025. See the full list here.
one Sunghyun Park, co-founder and CEO of Seongnam-based AI chip design company Rebellions, received the call he least expected. Ryu Young-Sang, head of SK Telecom, South Korea's largest mobile operator, recalled the 40-year-old park, and he wanted to meet and discuss the union of South Korea's conceited semiconductor industry. But even in Ryu “is related to me talking about mergers, I think mergers are the only way to survive,” Parker said frankly.
From high-frequency trading to large language model tools such as Openai-enabled Chatgpt, the Rebellion once used its energy-efficient AI computer chip to name itself. After launching the company in 2020, Parker raised $225 million in five rounds to fund its atomic chip series, which has become the preferred bargaining chip for South Korea’s data centers. The next generation of rebellion's low-power exhaust chips (designed for electric power consumption AI height standard) are on the way. But Parker knew very well that he could not send it alone to achieve his global ambitions.
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Meanwhile, SK Telecom is the crown jewelry that Chey Tae-Won (the 36th richest in South Korea) earned in the commercial empire – owns its own AI chip startup Sapeon South Korea, whose X330 chips rebel in the domestic market. Ryu and Park concluded that by joining together, they will not only create a national chip champion, but also have enough weight and size to take root overseas global competitors, including the industry’s undisputed leader, the U.S. tech giant Nvidia.
“Only a handful of AI chip players can survive,” Parker said. “In this rapidly changing market, we need to consolidate all the top talent in South Korea in one company.” He added: “I don’t want to waste time and energy to compete in Korea.”
Even capturing a part of the global market will change the game. The demand for AI chips has exploded in the past two years as companies compete to adopt generative AI tools that have been trained with extensive data. Global sales are expected to reach $92 billion in 2025, up 29% from $71 billion in 2024, according to US technology consulting firm Gartner.
In December, all-share transactions were sealed, and Sapeon issued 2.4 shares per rebellion to create South Korea’s first AI Chip Unicorn, worth 1.3 trillion won, which was equivalent to $1 billion at the time ($900 million today). The merged entity that retains the rebellious management team and name is the largest supplier of AI chips. Its blue chip client list includes SK and the cloud division of Internet giant Kakao (by Kim Beom-Su, No. 7) and Naver (Lee Hae-Jin, No. 19).
“merge [with Sapeon] It is one of the smartest moves. Why do you want to compete with your neighbors? ”
“Only a handful of AI chip players can survive.”
The new alliance offers Parker, who retains nearly 10% of the combined entity under regulatory filings, accesses HBM3E, an advanced high-bandwidth memory chip that significantly improves data processing speeds and is manufactured by the group's memory chip arm, SK SK Hynix. “Failure in foundries [manufacturing] Parker said the ability, as well as the shortage of HBM. “In addition to SK Hynix, the other two global suppliers of cutting-edge chips are Samsung Electronics and Idaho-based Boise.
Still, increasing sales domestically and growing internationally is a tricky proposition. Convincing data centers are AI chips from companies other than NVIDIA, which has a market share of about 90%, almost as difficult as making the chip itself, according to British research firm Futurum Intelligence. NVIDIA (market cap: $2.8 trillion) reported that data center chip sales were $35.6 billion in the fourth quarter ended January 2025, nine times the rate of its closest competitor, California chip maker AMD (market cap: $156 billion), generating $3.9 billion in revenue in the last three months of 2024.
By comparison, Minnow's rebellion targeted 2025's revenue of 100 billion won, about $68 million. According to the latest available documents, the company received 2.7 billion won in revenue (the previous year's sales, net loss was unavailable), with net loss expanding to 13.7 billion wins of 13.7 billion won, from 8.8 billion won in 2022222222.
Chip companies with global ambitions must first prove that their chips have obvious advantages over Nvidia. In early 2026, the rebel will begin mass production of its rebel chips named in the same name, designed for energy-efficient reasoning, i.e. behavioral behaviors used for when to use AI models. According to International Energy Corporation, this is a big deal, because the CHATGPT request for AI servers is the International Energy Agency, which consumes ten times more power than Google searches.
According to company performance testing, Park claims that the new processor will triple the AI workload, and the H100 is the H100 launched in the second half of 2022 compared to NVIDIA's most energy-efficient AI chips. The CEO said Rebel's 144 Gigabytes is HBM3E's 144 Gigabytes HBM3E Mebory Cosite aa Big aa ag a able a 100 cook aa 100 cook a a100 able 100 able 100. He explained that, for example, this requires two H100s to power the Meta's Llama 3.1 large language model compared to just one Rebel chip.
Chip companies with global ambitions must first prove that their chips have obvious advantages over Nvidia.
“In terms of total cost of ownership [purchase price plus operating costs]Rebel's reasoning is cheaper than H100. “Park says. The H100 has a peak power consumption of 400W, while the Rebel Chip can only provide one PETAFLOP (1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, while using only 350W of power. However, Park clastes, “the H100 is the right solution if you want to do training and training and concepts.” ”
The company would not disclose how many rebel chips it plans to produce, citing a confidential agreement with its customers. NVIDIA is preparing its next-generation AI chip B200 for batch delivery this quarter. It says the latest in its Blackwell line is Hopper's successor, which is up to 30 times more reasoning performance and 25 times more energy efficiency than the HBM3E's hopper chip and 192GB. Still, this power packed chip is expected to be more expensive, giving the rebel a chance to position the rebel chip as an economical option.
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South Korea's semiconductor exports hit a record $142 billion in 2024, accounting for one-fifth of the total exports.
Source: South Korea Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy
rKakao Ventures CEO Ki-Jun Kim said Ecruiting top talent was a key factor in the success of the rebellion, meeting Park for the first time in 2019 and decided to invest 2 billion won in an hour of conversation. Kim said Park's strict hiring standards, such as hiring experienced design engineers at top semiconductor companies, helped the rebellion earn South Korea's reputation as “the rocket ship that everyone wants to join.”
Although South Korea has a relatively small country, South Korea has top semiconductor talent. It is the world's two largest memory chip manufacturers (Samsung Electronics from Chey's SK Hynix and Jay Y. Lee) and key industry suppliers, including equipment maker Kwak Dong Shin's (No. 22) Soulbrain from Hanmi semiconductor and chemical manufacturer Chung Ji-Wan. Supportive government policies have helped foster a dense technology ecosystem of intensive business groups and startups in the country, for example, Soulbrain’s largest customer is Samsung, while Hanmi offers SK Hynix.
In early 2026, the rebel will begin mass production of its rebel chips named in the same name, aiming to run AI models with less power.
Jae-hyun Kim Asia Forbes
Semiconductors are also the largest export category in the country's trading country, with annual exports of approximately $684 billion, and the U.S. market accounts for 19% of the country's total. While semiconductors were exempted from President Donald Trump’s tariff axe, at least for now, they can’t completely escape it because they are embedded in products, such as AI servers, which may face additional import duties.
After receiving his bachelor’s degree from the Korean Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) in 2006, Parker moved to the United States, where he studied electrical engineering and computer science at MIT. This led to work from Intel, Samsung Mobile and Elon Musk's Starlink (where he was a chip design engineer), before the park landed in Morgan Stanley, New York in 2018. When developing quantum models for the bank's high-frequency trading system, he believed that if the machine is built with a custom chip, the order can be executed faster.
Two years later, he returned home and began a rebellion with Jinwook Oh, a Kaist alum and former chief designer at IBM Research Lab in New York, who became the chief technology officer of the rebellion. They received 5.5 billion won seed funding from supporters such as Kakao Ventures, who built a prototype, Ion chips, in 2021, from which they developed their first commercial AI product, the Power-Lean Atom line, launched in 2023 and touted as a cost alternative to data centers.
Another niche of the rebellion, Parker said, is to offer an all-in-one solution, rather than just selling chips. “One lesson I learned from customers is that they want turnkey hardware services,” he explained. “Just plug in.” When super-raters buy AI chips, installation requires technical expertise – supply shortage of skills, parks. Few chip companies go beyond selling hardware to retain their gross margins.
In November, the rebel teamed up with Taiwanese electronic assembler Pegatron to develop an AI server powered by rebel chips. This was followed by a collaboration with Penguin Solutions in California, which was announced in March to help customers set up or plug into server infrastructure in their AI chip fleet. “AI chip designers don’t want to work with others to avoid profit sharing and keep profit margins high,” Parker said. “But I like sharing because the market is getting bigger and bigger.”
The bigger challenge is finding new customers overseas. Last August, Park reached its first deal with Saudi Aramco to supply AI chips to its data centers (the oil giant's WAED Ventures had invested $15 million in rebellion a month ago, its first investment in South Korea), and received orders from the U.S., Japan and Thailand at the end of the year. He said that based on sales this year, an IPO may also occur as early as 2026.
Yoo Hoi-jun, the graduate dean of Kaist AI Semiconductor, is very optimistic. He said via email that the rebellion is driving the borders in terms of high-speed memory and AI optimization. In the AI community, “they call it one of the most exciting names to watch in the global chip space.”
