Rebellions designed AI chip ATOM which only consumes about 20% of the power of the Nvidia A100 chip since it can target specific tasks.
Heaptalk, Jakarta — South Korean AI-semiconductor startup Rebellions Inc released an artificial intelligence chip in an effort to obtain government contracts as Seoul looks for local companies to join the AI industry, as reported by Reuters (02/13).
Rebellions’ latest chip, namely ATOM, is launched to challenge global manufacturer Nvidia Corp, primarily on hardware segmentation for AI technology. Previously, AI has been the talk of the technology world since OpenAI released ChatGPT which gained 100 million monthly active users only two months after its launch.
Rebellions designed ATOM to run computer vision and AI chatbot applications. According to Rebellions co-founder and chief executive Park Sunghyun, the ATOM chip only consumes about 20% of the power of the Nvidia A100 chip since it can target specific tasks instead of doing a wide range.
Further, A100 is the most well-known chip for AI workloads as it is powerful enough to build or train AI models. Meanwhile, ATOM, designed by Rebellions and manufactured by Korean company Samsung Electronics, does not carry out training.
Nvidia generates around 86% of the computing power of the world’s six largest cloud services as of December 2022, making it a large share of high-end AI chips, according to Reuters.
South Korea to lift 80% of AI chip market share
The South Korean government has ambitions to grow the domestic industry by investing more than $800 million over the next five years in chip research and development. The effort aims to lift Korea’s AI chip market share in domestic data centers from zero to 80% by 2030.
“It is hard to catch up to Nvidia, which is so far ahead in general-purpose AI chips. But it is not set in stone because AI chips can carry out different functions and there are no set boundaries or metrics,” said Kim Yang-Paeng, senior researcher at the Korea Institute for Industrial Economics and Trade, as quoted by Reuters.
Korea’s focus on improving AI chips is considered unusual in comparison to other countries including Taiwan, China, France, Germany, and the US which launched extensive plans to support their semiconductor companies.
According to an official at the Ministry of Science and ICT, Seoul will issue a notice in Feb 2023 of two data centers, called neural processing unit farms, with only domestic chipmakers allowed to bid.
