Rebellions Secures Public Procurement Fast Track as Ministry Designates ATOM-Max NPU as Innovative Product

Rebellions has announced that its ATOM-Max NPU card and server have been designated as “Excellent R&D Innovative Products” by the Ministry of Science and ICT, opening a direct procurement channel for Korean public-sector AI infrastructure.

The designation enables government agencies to contract directly with Rebellions without competitive bidding, shortening procurement cycles from sixty days to ten days or less, and marks the first institutional pathway for a domestic neural processing unit to enter Korea’s public AI systems at scale.

The designation was recommended by the Ministry of Science and ICT and finalized by the Ministry of Economy and Finance’s Procurement Policy Deliberation Committee. It recognizes the commercialization of technology developed through government-funded national R&D projects and confirms the technical innovation of Rebellions’ products. Public agencies may now execute sole-source contracts with Rebellions and enjoy purchasing liability exemptions unless gross negligence is proven. Both the ATOM-Max card and server are included in the Public Procurement Service’s 59 billion KRW pilot procurement programme for innovative products this year and will be listed on the Public Procurement Service Innovation Marketplace. The initial designation is valid for three years and may be extended up to six years through two renewals.

The change is expected to lower barriers for government institutions to adopt domestic NPU infrastructure, improving cost efficiency and service quality in AI-powered public platforms. At a designation ceremony held at Rebellions’ office on 13 August 2026, CEO Sunghyun Park demonstrated the ATOM-Max card’s specifications and compared its efficiency directly against foreign GPU products in a live benchmark.

The announcement follows Rebellions’ expanding deployment in the public sector. The company is currently delivering ATOM-Max servers to Gyeongsangnam-do provincial government and Ulsan Metropolitan City as part of the Ministry of Science and ICT and National Information Society Agency’s national programme to convert public AI CCTV systems to domestic NPU platforms. Deliveries began in August 2026. The project, which runs vision-language models with more than 30 billion parameters for video analysis in control centres, represents the first operational use of a Korean NPU in public safety infrastructure.

During the evaluation process, Rebellions highlighted the ATOM-Max server’s energy efficiency and versatility. Officially certified power measurements demonstrate substantial reductions in total cost of ownership, covering both deployment and operating expenses. The company’s proprietary Rebellions Scalable Design (RSD) technology aggregates multiple NPU units within a single server, enabling the platform to handle models from 8 billion to 70 billion parameters. In addition, Rebellions officially supports the open-source vLLM inference engine used as a standard by developers, and is the only Korean provider supporting the RedHat NPU Operator widely deployed in enterprise inference environments. This compatibility allows public agencies to integrate ATOM-Max systems without changing existing development toolchains.

Rebellions’ competitive position rests on in-house design of NPU cores and software optimization, combined with active use of domestic foundry and supply-chain partners. This structure reduces dependence on foreign suppliers, enhances supply resilience, and satisfies the data-sovereignty and infrastructure-control prerequisites of sovereign AI.

“Following proven performance in consumer AI services and the public CCTV deployment, this innovative-product designation will accelerate the adoption of domestic NPUs across the public sector,” said CEO Sunghyun Park. “We will continue to expand the scope and scale of sovereign AI infrastructure with RebelServer, Korea’s highest-performance system.”

Rebellions, founded in September 2020, develops full-stack AI infrastructure spanning data-centre inference NPUs, system software, and rack-scale servers. The company controls the entire process from compute-core design to volume production and supply-chain management. Its ATOM-series NPUs are operational in commercial AI services at Korean data centres, telecommunications carriers and cloud providers. Rebellions was selected as the first direct investment of the National Growth Fund and has raised cumulative funding exceeding 1.3 trillion KRW since inception. The company is now targeting the global market with Rebel100, a high-performance, high-efficiency NPU based on HBM3E memory.

Korea’s public AI infrastructure has historically relied on foreign GPUs. The Ministry designation creates an institutional foundation for a domestic NPU to compete on equal regulatory footing, mirroring sovereign-AI strategies pursued by national governments worldwide. Rebellions has previously raised a $424 million pre-IPO round as the first direct investment of Korea’s National Growth Fund and acquired AI inference specialist SqueezeBits to become a full-stack AI infrastructure company. The Ministry of SMEs and Startups reported that Korea’s venture investment reached $9.6 billion in 2025, including significant flows to semiconductor and AI hardware startups. Other recent funding rounds in Korea’s semiconductor ecosystem include Point2 Technology’s $80 million Series B extension for AI interconnect solutions.