SKT Sapion, which has maintained its top position in the domestic AI semiconductor market, and domestic AI semiconductor startup Rebellion have joined hands and revealed their ambition to combine the development capabilities and know-how they have proven in the NPU market.

SKT affiliate Sapion Korea announced on the 12th that it is pursuing a merger with Rebellion as it seeks to establish a leading AI semiconductor company in South Korea within the year. In addition, KT, Rebellion's second largest shareholder, has also agreed to pursue this merger.

SKT and Rebellion said that the next two to three years will be “the golden time” for South Korea to seize the opportunity in the global AI semiconductor market, and that they have begun the process of quickly merging. The two companies plan to complete the main contract for the merger within the third quarter after going through necessary procedures such as due diligence and shareholder approval, and launch the integrated corporation within the year.

The management of the merged company will be handled by the startup Rebellion, and SKT will be a strategic investor after the merger, while Sapion's shareholders SK Square and SK Hynix will also support the merged company.

Meanwhile, KT has been continuously investing in Rebellion to transform into an 'AI full-stack' business, starting with an investment of 30 billion won in 2022, and some say that the merger push is like SKT and KT joining hands.

The move by the two companies reveals their intention to become the nation's representative companies for the AI infrastructure war through integration among domestic AI semiconductor companies amid fierce competition among global companies to dominate the global NPU (Neural Processing Unit) market.

Sapion Korea is an AI semiconductor company that was spun off from SKT's internal R&D organization in 2016. In 2020, it introduced Korea's first AI semiconductor for data centers, and unveiled the next-generation AI semiconductor 'X330' in November of last year.

Rebellion is an AI semiconductor fabless startup co-founded by CEO Park Sung-hyun and CTO Oh Jin-wook in 2020. Since its founding, it has released two products over the past three years and has been recognized as having a corporate value of 880 billion won. The AI semiconductor 'ATOM' released last year accelerated LLM as the first data center commercialization in Korea and entered mass production this year. Rebellion is currently developing the next-generation AI semiconductor 'REBEL' targeting the large language model market.