South Korea's Rebellions Inc Looks to Challenge Nvidia in AI Chip Dominance

The field of artificial intelligence is continuously expanding as Big Tech companies introduce cutting-edge AI tools. Now, a South Korean startup wants to join in the race after introducing a new AI chip to clinch government contracts and challenge Nvidia's global dominance in the chip sector.

Rebellion's ATOM Chip

According to a report by Reuters. Rebellions' ATOM Chip is taking its shot to challenge Nvidia as companies like Microsoft and Google compete in offering the most advanced AI chatbots.

US-based Nvidia is currently dominating the market share of sophisticated AI chips, with a strong 86% of the computing power of the six largest cloud services in the world as of December 2022, according to Mark Lipacis, Jeffries' chip analyst.

South Korea has already invested over $800 billion for the next five years to advance the development of Korean AI chips to increase their market share in domestic data centers from zero to 80% by 2030.

Kim Yang-Paeng, the senior researcher at the Korea Institute for Industrial Economics and Trade, told Reuters that catching up to Nvidia is not an easy feat but it can still be challenged since AI chips have various functions that are not set in stone.

The ATOM from Rebellions is made to be extremely effective at running chatbot and machine vision applications. According to Park Sunghyun, co-founder and CEO of Rebellions, the chip uses only 20% of the power of an Nvidia A100 chip on certain operations since it focuses on a narrow range of jobs rather than doing a large variety of them.

According to Reuters, South Korea supplies half the world's memory chips and it now looks to establish a market that can serve as a testing ground for AI chipmakers and spark international competition.

AI Race

The AI race between Google and Microsoft is one of the hottest things in tech now. Google recently unveiled its AI chatbot Bard as Microsoft's ChatGPT gain steam from the past few months.

Both tech giants want to integrate these AI tools into their search engines. Google is currently dominating this field but it is now being challenged by Microsoft upon announcing that it will equip Bing with advanced AI features.

Google's Bard is still in a closed testing experiment but Microsoft has already showcased its latest AI integration via Bing.com since the tech has been introduced for months now.

Bard's testing was not particularly successful as Google's stock bear heavy damages after the AI tool provided an incorrect answer when asked about the first photograph of an exoplanet.

The AI tool responded to the question by saying that the James Webb Space Telescope was the first to capture it even though the correct answer is ESO's Very Large Telescope.

However, it is too early to call on which company is winning the race. Both tools are still in the early stages of integration and it will only be a matter of time when we know which one gets the ultimate win.