The Korean fabless semiconductor company Rebellions has completed its merger with SAPEON and officially launched as Rebellions on the 1st. This comes about six months after the merger announcement in June. The merged corporation is valued at approximately KRW 1.3 trillion (around $975 million), making it Korea’s leading AI semiconductor unicorn.

The merger was driven by the need to achieve economies of scale and strengthen collaboration in AI semiconductors, particularly as AI infrastructure becomes a key strategic and security asset. With the merger, Rebellion has scaled up its workforce, resources, and partnerships, positioning itself to compete globally.

The merged company is led by CEO Park Seong-hyun, an expert in AI and system semiconductors with a PhD from MIT’s Computer Science and AI Lab (CSAIL) and extensive experience at Intel, SpaceX, and Morgan Stanley. Under his leadership, Rebellions aims to go beyond being Korea’s top AI semiconductor company and demonstrate the potential of Korean semiconductors on the global stage.

Rebellions’ business scope has grown with new strategic investors. SK Telecom and SK Hynix, previously shareholders of SAPEON, are supporting Rebellions’ growth. The company plans to collaborate with SKT to expand into the global AI data center market, targeting regions like the United States, Saudi Arabia, and Japan.

By uniting the semiconductor experts from both companies, Rebellions expects to boost development efficiency and speed. On the hardware side, the company is leveraging Chiplet technology in its next-generation AI semiconductor, REBEL, to proactively address rapidly evolving AI demand. Rebellions is also strengthening its presence in the PyTorch ecosystem, an open-source machine learning library, enabling more efficient development and deployment of AI services.

Over the next three months, Rebellions will focus on the Post-Merger Integration (PMI) process, emphasizing organizational alignment. By combining Rebellion’s agility as a startup with SAPEON’s robust systems, the company aims to swiftly adapt to changes in the AI semiconductor market and strengthen its new business capabilities.

CEO Park Sung-hyun remarked, “The global AI semiconductor market is already being reshaped by Nvidia’s dominance. In this context, the merger of Korea’s two leading NPU companies is a crucial factor in determining the success of the nation’s AI semiconductor industry. I will lead the merged corporation with a strong sense of responsibility, recognizing this as a critical battleground for the industry.”