NVIDIA is in talks for a potential deal with chip startup Rebellions

According to informed sources, NVIDIA is in preliminary discussions with South Korean AI chip design company Rebellions to explore various cooperation possibilities, including technological collaboration, investment, and even acquisition.

The sources stated that NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang met with Rebellions co-founder and CEO Sunghyun Park this week at NVIDIA's headquarters in Santa Clara, California, to discuss potential collaboration. In recent years, NVIDIA has been aggressively investing to solidify its core position in the era of artificial intelligence.

NVIDIA's investment targets include several well-known startups. By the end of 2025, NVIDIA reached a non-traditional deal with American AI company Groq, obtaining a non-exclusive technology license while absorbing most of Groq's engineering talent. NVIDIA stated that this deal is not an acquisition, and Groq will continue to operate independently, with its cloud business also being conducted autonomously.

Based in Bundang, South Korea, Rebellions has raised approximately $850 million from investors including SK Hynix, Samsung Ventures, and Arm, with a latest valuation of about $2.3 billion. The company has also received direct investment from the South Korean government.

The sources indicated that NVIDIA and the six-year-old Rebellions are still in the preliminary negotiation stage and may not finalize a substantial deal. NVIDIA did not respond to requests for comment, and representatives from Rebellions also declined to comment.

Rebellions was founded during the pandemic in 2020 and is part of a group of semiconductor startups that develop and produce chips aimed at challenging industry leader NVIDIA. The company focuses on neural processing units (NPU) for data centers, optimizing products for AI inference tasks. Inference tasks require less computing power than AI training but have a larger computing demand when running AI services at scale.

NVIDIA holds an absolute dominant share in the market for chips used in AI model training for companies like OpenAI and Anthropic, thus needing to be cautious of antitrust scrutiny. Large acquisitions in the tech industry typically require approval from regulatory bodies such as the U.S. Department of Justice.

Similar acquisition deal structures may also attract regulatory scrutiny from the South Korean government, as semiconductors are considered a key strategic asset in South Korea. Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix, as major global memory chip manufacturers, will collaborate closely with the South Korean government on new investment projects