Semiconductor Sovereignty: Seoul Pours $166M into Rebellions AI Chips

On March 26, 2026, the South Korean government took a major step in the global hardware race. The National Growth Fund approved a direct investment of 250 billion won (about $166 million) in the local startup Rebellions.

The goal is highly pragmatic: to reduce the country's dependence on NVIDIA's monopoly and accelerate the development of proprietary next-generation NPUs (Neural Processing Units). South Korea, which controls a significant portion of global memory production (through Samsung and SK Hynix), is now building a full cycle of AI computing infrastructure creation. The investment in Rebellions ensures that Korean chips will be deeply integrated with the latest HBM4 memory at the hardware level.

Source: Reuters / FSC