Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

CTOnews.com February 13 news, artificial intelligence is currently the hottest topic in the technology industry. ChatGPT, a chat robot developed by Microsoft-supported OpenAI, has become the fastest-growing consumer application in history only two months after its release, causing people to marvel in various fields.

Us chip designer Nvidia dominates the high-end artificial intelligence chip market, said Mark Lipacis, a chip analyst at Jefferies. As of December last year, the company's products accounted for 86% of the computing power of the world's six largest cloud services, which can be called a monopoly.

In this case, whether China, France, Germany, the United States, or other countries are stepping up research and development of their own products. Of course, the South Korean government has also made great efforts to nurture the domestic industry, investing more than $800 million in research and development over the next five years, with a view to increasing the market share of South Korean artificial intelligence chips in the country's data centers from basically zero to 80% by 2030.

Today, South Korean start-up Rebellions unveiled an artificial intelligence chip, ATOM, and won a number of government contracts as Seoul is also seeking a place for local companies in the exploding artificial intelligence industry. The emergence of ATOM has provided impetus for the potential revolution of artificial intelligence technology in South Korea.

"it's hard to catch up with Nvidia, which is far ahead of general artificial intelligence chips," said Kim Yang-Paeng, a senior researcher at the Korea Industrial Economic Research Institute. "but this is not immutable because AI chips can perform different functions without set boundaries or indicators."

According to reports, Rebellions's ATOM chip is designed to run computer vision and chat robot artificial intelligence applications. Rebellions co-founder and CEO Park Sung-hyun said that because the chip is aimed at specific tasks, not a wide range of tasks, it consumes only about 20% of the power consumption of the Nvidia A100 chip when performing these tasks. It is reported that the ATOM is designed by Rebellions and produced by Samsung Electronics.

It is well known that the Nvidia A100 is the strongest and most extensive chip for artificial intelligence workloads, powerful enough to create (in industry terms, "training") a set of artificial intelligence models on its own.

In fact, although South Korea also has extensive plans to support its semiconductor companies, the South Korean government rarely focuses specifically on artificial intelligence chips.

Seoul will issue tender notices for two data centres called neural processing unit farm this month, allowing only local chipmakers to bid, according to an official from South Korea's Ministry of Science and Information and Communications Technology.

In a country that supplies half the world's memory chips, the authorities hope to create a market that could become a test platform for artificial intelligence chipmakers, aimed at nurturing large global product partnerships.

"the government is forcing data centres to tell them, 'Hey, use these chips,'" says Park of Rebellions, who is said to have worked as an engineer at Morgan Stanley. Without this support, data centres and their customers may insist on using Nvidia chips instead of domestic products, he said.

It is worth mentioning that the SK telecom subsidiary said that Sapeon Korea Inc also plans to participate in the project. FuriosaAI, which is backed by Naver Corp, South Korea's largest search engine, and the state-owned Korean Development Bank, said it would also bid.

"there is a lot of momentum behind Nvidia's development." these start-ups have to build up their momentum, but it takes time, "said Alan Priestley, an analyst at Gartner, an IT research firm." but government incentives, such as what happened in South Korea, are likely to affect the market's share in South Korea. "

In addition, Rebellions is seeking to form a consortium with KT Corp, a large South Korean telecom, cloud and data center operator, to participate in government projects to free Nvidia's customers from their dependence on American products.

Pei Hanzhe, vice president of KT, said, "at a time when the world is highly dependent on overseas GPU, the cooperation between KT and Rebellions will enable us to have a 'full stack of AI', including software and hardware, based on domestic technology."

CTOnews.com briefly checked the capital composition of Rebellions. So far, the company has raised 122 billion won (currently about 656 million yuan), of which 30 billion won is from KT, although Singapore's Temasek Pavilion Capital is also involved in the financing. Another 10 billion won (currently about 53.8 million yuan) comes from the South Korean government.

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