SK Telecom (CEO Yoo Young-sang) and AI semiconductor startup Rebellion (CEO Park Sung-hyun) have joined hands to achieve self-reliance in the domestic AI ecosystem.

SKT announced on the 25th that it is currently testing Rebellion's neural processing unit (NPU) to its main AI services, and plans to maximize the performance and efficiency of various services such as 'Adot Phone Call Summary', PASS Spam Filtering, PASS Financial Secretary, and Excalibur.

This collaboration is the first step toward realizing sovereign AI, or national sovereignty AI service, through the meeting of SKT's LLM (Large-Scale Language Model) 'AX 4.0' and Rebellion's AI semiconductor Atom, in which a domestically produced LLM is driven by a domestically produced NPU.

Adot Phone call summary has already established itself as SKT's representative AI voice service and is receiving attention not only in Korea but also in the Asian market.

This combination of technologies is expected to bring about innovation across future AI data centers and related services, while demonstrating superior performance in terms of energy efficiency and processing speed.

Based on the results of this test, the two companies aim to commercialize the 'Atom Max, an AI semiconductor for large-scale AI inference', which is one step upgraded from the existing Atom, within the year.

SKT is rebellion We plan to gradually introduce NPU to strengthen the capabilities of AI services overall and play a pivotal role in establishing the foundation for the domestic AI ecosystem.

This collaboration between the two companies is evaluated as an important strategy to strengthen independence in future core technology fields that will determine national competitiveness, beyond simple technology application.

SKT Growth Business Promotion Office Director Lee Sang-min emphasized, “As international competition in AI technology intensifies, expanding domestic AI infrastructure is an important element of national competitiveness beyond the corporate level,” and “We will continue to invest and concentrate our technological capabilities in various fields such as AI data centers, LLM, and AI semiconductors.”

On the other hand, Rebellion CEO Park Sung-hyun said, “The fact that domestically produced AI semiconductors are being applied to SKT’s domestic LLM-based service is an important milestone for realizing self-reliance in the domestic AI ecosystem beyond technological perfection,” and expressed his ambition, saying, “We will contribute to Korea’s leap forward as an AI powerhouse by building a stable and energy-efficient AI infrastructure in the future.”