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SKT representative Yoo Young-sang (left) and Rebellion representative Park Sung-hyun

After the Yoon Seok-yeol government announced a subsidy of 1.4 trillion won to the AI ​​semiconductor field, a merger and acquisition case of an AI chip company worth 1 trillion won was born.

Titanium Media App reported on August 19th,SK Telecom (SKT)'s AI chip subsidiary Sapeon Korea and Korean AI chip startup Rebellions jointly announced on the 18th that they have officially signed a merger agreement to complete the merger and acquisition transaction.

According to the statement, the merger is expected to form a new entity valued at more than 1 trillion won (about 740 million U.S. dollars, about 5.337 billion yuan), becoming a unicorn company representing South Korea's AI chip industry, named "Rebellion".Rebellion co-founder and CEO Sunghyun Park will serve as the new company's CEO, responsible for the management of the merged company, while SK Telecom will support the new company's expansion plans as a strategic investor.

Reuters said that this new AI chip giant will comprehensively challengeNvidia, AMD, etc., have occupied a place in the global AI chip market.

Regarding the merger, Park Sung-hyun said: "The conclusion of this merger agreement was made possible by the consensus of all-out efforts at the national level, the major decisions and support of investors and major business partners of both parties. This is necessary to promote the development of Korea's AI semiconductor industry. We will show the potential of Korean companies in the global 'AI semiconductor war' that is more intense than ever with a start-up mentality."

SKT CEO Yoo Young-sang said: "By signing this master contract, we will be able to significantly improve the global competitiveness of 'AI chips,' one of the three areas of the AI ​​value chain that SKT is building. SKT will continue to leap forward to become a global AI leader, and we will continue to actively invest and collaborate to achieve this goal."

It is reported that,AI startup Rebellions was founded in 2020 and launched two products within three years of its founding. It launched its first NPU chip ATOM in 2023, which is also the first NPU developed in South Korea for training large AI models. It was put into mass production this year. It is currently developing the AI ​​chip product "REBEL" for large model training and reasoning. To date, Rebellions has completed more than US$225 million in financing, and the company is valued at 880 billion won.

SK Telecom's Sapeon was founded in 2022. It was originally a joint venture between SK Telecom, South Korea's second largest chipmaker SK Hynix and SKT's investment arm SK Square. It has released X220 and X330 series AI chip products. In November 2023, Sapeon released a new generation of X330 series AI chips, which are also aimed at data center servers and useTSMC7nm process technology supports AI large model reasoning. Among them, X330 Compact has 367TFLOPs computing power and integrated 16GB memory; X330 Prime has 734TFLOPs computing power and integrated 32GB memory. Sapeon said that compared with the latest AI reasoning chips launched by competitors, X330 is twice as fast and 1.3 times more energy efficient.

In April this year,The South Korean government announced that it will invest 9.4 trillion won (about 6.94 billion U.S. dollars) in the field of AI semiconductors by 2027 to maintain South Korea's global leading position in cutting-edge chip manufacturing and other fields.

Among them, South Korean President Yoon Seok-yeol announced that the plan includes a separate 1.4 trillion won government support fund to cultivate AI semiconductor companies, namely the government subsidy program in the chip field. Through special investments and funds, South Korea plans to significantly expand the research and development of AI chips, such as neural processing units (NPUs) and next-generation high-bandwidth memory (HBM). In addition, the South Korean government will also promote the next generation of general artificial intelligence (AGI) and safety technology.

Yoon Seok-yeol also set a goal that by 2030, South Korea will become one of the top three countries in the world in the field of AI and occupy more than 10% of the global AI chip market. "Just as we dominated the world with memory chips in the past 30 years, we will write a new legend with AI chips in the next 30 years."

In such an environment, on June 12, 2024,SK Telecom plans to promote the merger of Sapion and Rebellion, declaring the start of an all-out war for AI chips in South Korea, and the signing of this formal agreement marks the further advancement of the merger process.

"This merger push is the result of an agreement between the two companies to create a national company that will participate in the global AI infrastructure war through a major integration of domestic AI semiconductor companies. SKT and Rebellion view the next 2 to 3 years as the 'golden time' for South Korea to dominate the global AI semiconductor market, and based on the judgment that a quick merger is necessary, plan to complete the main contract and start integrating the company within the year. In addition, the two companies expect that the new merged company will be able to ensure competitiveness in the global AI semiconductor market by combining the development capabilities and proprietary technologies proven by Sapion Korea and Rebellion in the NPU market." The two companies said in a statement that Rebellion's strategic investor KT also agreed to advance the merger to ensure technological sovereignty and create a world-class AI semiconductor company.

According to the agreement, in order to allow Rebellion management to stably operate the new company after the merger, Sapion shareholders, consisting of SK Telecom, SK Hynix and SK Square, decided to sell 3% of their shares (on a post-merger basis) before the merger, but they will still be the largest shareholders of the new Rebellion. In addition, major shareholders, including Sapion and Rebellion executives, agreed not to dispose of their shares without the consent of the other party within a certain period of time.

With the Korean consortium SK in hand, the new Rebellions company has a very clear goal: to challenge Nvidia, the global AI chip giant.