South Korean chipmaker Rebellions on Friday entered into a new partnership with SK Telecom and U.K.-based chipmaker Arm, with the vendors set to build next-generation AI infrastructure for sovereign AI and telecom applications.
The partners will combine the first Arm-designed AI data center CPU with Rebellions’ AI chips to create new inference systems.
These systems will be tested in SK Telecom’s AI data center environment before being rolled out commercially.
In addition to hardware, the companies said they plan to jointly develop the full software stack, including firmware, and validate performance in live environments. This includes testing telecom-specific workloads and potentially running SK Telecom’s proprietary foundation model, A.X K1, on the new systems.
After validation, the group will explore commercial deployment opportunities, with a particular focus on expanding across Asia and supplying bespoke, stable infrastructure to telecom operators and government-backed AI initiatives.
“We expect this one-team collaboration of experts to serve as a significant precedent in the industry for building AI-specialized infrastructure,” Jinwook Oh, CTO of Rebellion, said in a release.
The deal comes amid rising demand for sovereign AI, with the companies positioning the alliance as meeting this need with high-performance, energy-efficient infrastructure to support large-scale AI workloads.
“As AI infrastructure expands globally, CPUs play a critical role in coordinating workloads across accelerators, memory and networking,” Eddie Ramirez, vice president of Arm’s Cloud AI Business Unit, said in the release. “Together with Rebellions and SK Telecom, we’re enabling scalable infrastructure for sovereign AI and telecommunications markets.”
Established in 2020, Rebellions was founded to provide energy-efficient AI infrastructure to compete with industry leaders such as Nvidia.
The company’s chips are focused on inference, meaning they run AI applications rather than train them. As global compute demand increases, industries are focusing on chips that can execute inference workloads quickly and with greater energy efficiency.
The latest deal comes as Rebellions continues to expand its operations into new markets. In March, the vendor revealed that it had raised $400 million to bring its chip offerings to the U.S. market.
Investors in the company to date include Samsung, SK Hynix and Saudi Aramco.
