AI chip startup Rebellions said on April 10 it will join hands with Arm and SK Telecom to jointly enter the market for inference infrastructure for sovereign AI and carrier-focused data centers. The partnership covers the entire process from infrastructure design to real-world verification. The companies will develop AI servers combining Arm's data center CPU and Rebellions' AI chips, and then proceed to validate the operating environment at an SK Telecom AI data center.

The 3 companies aim to work together on hardware integration and joint software development. They will jointly configure AI servers combining an 'Arm AGI CPU' based on Arm Neoverse CSS V3 and Rebellions' 'RebelCard'. Rebellions and Arm plan to jointly develop overall software, including firmware, rather than limiting cooperation to a simple hardware combination. The completed servers will be deployed at an SK Telecom AI data center, where the companies will check real data processing performance and stability.

RebelCard is a product that modularises Rebellions' AI chip, Rebel100, in card form. It combines 4 NPU chiplets and fifth-generation high bandwidth memory, HBM3E, delivering PetaFLOPS-class computing performance. Rebellions explained it offers performance on par with current-generation flagship GPUs and higher power efficiency. The 3 companies are also reviewing a plan to run SK Telecom's foundation model, A.X K1, on the servers.

The 2 companies already combined their respective chips at the 'Arm Everywhere' event in March to demonstrate in real time an agentic AI service based on OpenAI's language model GPT OSS 120B. The company stressed it conducted initial validation of applicability to large-scale data center workloads.

After technical validation, the 3 companies plan to identify commercialization opportunities. Rebellions will seek to secure the market mainly in Asia, targeting the global sovereign AI data center market. It will focus on global telecom companies and public institutions that need to build their own AI infrastructure.

Jinwook Oh (오진욱), chief technology officer of Rebellions, said, "Rebellions has come to take charge of a key pillar supporting next-generation AI data centers, based on RebelCard and full-stack software competitiveness." He added, "We expect this partnership, in which experts in each field have united as one team to build AI-specialised infrastructure, to become a very meaningful precedent in the industry."

Jaesin Lee (이재신), who oversees AI business development at SK Telecom, said, "By providing a full package that combines inference-optimised infrastructure and our proprietary foundation model A.X K1, we will further strengthen AI data center competitiveness."

Eddie Ramirez (에디 라미레즈), vice president of go-to-market for Arm's Cloud AI business division, said, "As AI infrastructure spreads globally, the role of the CPU in coordinating workloads across accelerators, memory and networking has become more important than ever."

He added, "The 'Arm AGI CPU', designed based on Arm Neoverse CSS V3, has the performance and efficiency essential for building large-scale AI." He said, "Based on this, we are pleased to work with key partners such as Rebellions and SK Telecom to realise scalable infrastructure for sovereign AI and the telecom market."