Jensen Huang hosted the chief executive of Korean chip startup Rebellions at Nvidia’s Santa Clara offices this week, and the two sides are exploring a technical partnership, an investment or a full acquisition, Bloomberg reported on Friday.
People briefed on the discussions say they remain early and could still fall apart. A Rebellions spokesperson declined to comment, and Nvidia did not answer questions.
Founded in 2020 and based in Bundang south of Seoul, Rebellions builds neural processing units aimed at inference, the compute-heavy work of running trained AI models. Backers including SK hynix, Samsung Ventures and Arm have invested roughly $850M, and the company was valued near $2.3B at its latest round. Its Atom NPUs have been in production since 2023, with deployments reported in Japan, Saudi Arabia and the United States, and it absorbed SK Telecom’s Sapeon Korea unit in 2024.
The approach fits Nvidia’s recent playbook of buying access to rival designs instead of taking over companies. It paid Groq $20B for a nonexclusive license to that startup’s inference technology, and agreed this week to pay Poolside $6B for its model factory and engineering staff. AMD bought inference startup Taalas in August.
Rebellions competes in the same inference category Nvidia entered through Groq. A deal would hand Nvidia a second inference architecture and pull a rising Korean challenger out of the market.
