Samsung backs AI chip rival in $250M funding round as GPU alternatives rise

Samsung is putting serious money behind the idea that Nvidia doesn’t have to own the entire AI chip market. The Korean electronics giant participated in a $250 million Series C funding round for Rebellions, a South Korean AI chip startup now valued at $1.4 billion. Samsung’s foundry division is already manufacturing Rebellions’ chips on its 4nm and 5nm processes, with plans to move to 2nm technology down the road. Who else is at the table Samsung Ventures wasn’t alone in this round. Arm, Pegatron VC, and Korea Development Bank also participated in the funding. Korea Development Bank’s involvement adds a layer of government-backed strategic interest. South Korea has been vocal about its ambitions to remain a semiconductor superpower, and funneling state-linked capital into domestic AI chip startups fits that playbook perfectly. What Rebellions actually builds Rebellions focuses on specialized accelerators designed for AI inference workloads, the computational tasks that happen after a model has been trained, when it’s actually generating answers, images, or predictions in real time. Rebellions’ flagship design, called Rebel-Quad, uses a chiplet-based architecture. Rather than buildi...