Korean NPU makers seek track records ahead of potential IPOs

Rebellions, FuriosaAI and DEEPX, three domestic Korean makers of neural processing units (NPUs), are striving to build track records in the market, as securing actual customers and generating revenue are essential to raising their valuations and pursuing initial public offerings (IPOs). Rebellions, which designs its ATOM NPU for small data centers and on-device artificial intelligence (AI), said Monday that it will supply ATOM-Max Servers to public surveillance control centers operated by the South Gyeongsang Provincial Government and Ulsan Metropolitan City. Marking the first case of an AI-based public CCTV surveillance system in Korea, Rebellions’ ATOM-Max will run a large vision-language model with 30 billion parameters on servers at the control centers to analyze surveillance footage. The system will identify fires and suspicious activity and generate Korean-language descriptions of the situations. Earlier, the company ran SK Telecom’s hyperscale AI model A.X K1 on a single one of its own servers, while KT Cloud has been offering cloud services powered by ATOM. Rebellions is als