"The center of gravity in artificial intelligence (AI) is now shifting rapidly from 'training' to 'inference.' That is why I am convinced that the largest semiconductor market in human history will open not in training, which Nvidia dominates, but in inference, which will be used in everyday life."
Park Sung-hyun, CEO of Rebellions, made these remarks as a special speaker on the second day of "Seoul Forum 2026," held Friday at the Shilla Hotel in Jung-gu, central Seoul. "Despite the bubble debate, the AI industry is growing exponentially and drawing unprecedented capital and opportunity," he said.
Rebellions is a company that designs application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs) optimized for AI inference. Having achieved cumulative investment of 1.3 trillion won and a corporate valuation of 3.4 trillion won, the firm became the first company to receive direct investment from the National Growth Fund under the government's "K-Nvidia Fostering Strategy." It is also pursuing strategic collaborations across the major global semiconductor ecosystem, including Samsung Electronics and SK hynix, as well as ARM, Marvell, Synopsys and Pegatron.
According to market research firms such as Gartner and Bloomberg, the inference segment of the global AI semiconductor market is expected to grow more than 12-fold over six years, from $39 billion in 2024 to more than $475 billion in 2030. "If training is the body-building process of learning skills ahead of competing in the Olympics, inference is delivering an already-completed model to everyday life," Park said. "Unlike the business-to-business (B2B), research-focused training market, inference is a business-to-consumer (B2C) market where the world's population uses conversational AI or chatbots, so it will become the largest market ever, surpassing DRAM."
Behind the attention on inference chips lies "energy efficiency." Global data center power demand for running AI semiconductors is expected to surge 30-fold, from 11 gigawatts (GW) in 2024 to 327 GW in 2030. "The standard for evaluating a data center is now not the size of the site but how much power you can pull in (power bound)," Park said. "Power has become such a key bottleneck that visions have even emerged to solve it in space, because sufficient power supply is impossible on Earth."
Rebellions is taking direct aim at the cost and power problems of the inference market. The company is determined to challenge the AI accelerator market dominated by Nvidia by maximizing total cost of ownership (TCO) efficiency, including power, through a design optimized solely for inference. In fact, Rebellions' neural processing unit (NPU) boasts five to seven times the price efficiency of other companies' systems in benchmarks and real-world environments. "Nvidia's ecosystem has tremendous versatility and flexibility, but Rebellions has focused solely on inference efficiency," Park explained.
Nvidia's dominance comes not from simple hardware performance but from a software ecosystem represented by "CUDA." Park presented a strategy to challenge Nvidia's monopoly through an open-source ecosystem. This means that Big Tech's determination not to be bound by Nvidia's proprietary technology is converging on the open-source ecosystem, and Rebellions can seize an opportunity in such an environment. "In the past, the key driving force that allowed Intel to break IBM was not the silicon chip itself but the emergence of Linux, an open source," Park said. "In the inference market too, a 'Linux moment' is being reenacted, centered on open-source ecosystems such as PyTorch and vLLM."
Rebellions is already producing commercialization results. It is responsible for running SK Telecom's "A. Call Recording Summary," and through KT Cloud it unveiled Korea's first NPUaaS (NPU as a Service). Recently, it has also joined hands with Saudi Arabia's Aramco to build infrastructure for realizing sovereign AI. "In the globally entangled semiconductor war, where it is hard to tell who is friend or foe, the key is maintaining the ecosystem," Park said. "Rebellions' ambition and journey is to confidently take on and defeat the giant that is Nvidia on the global stage two to three years from now."
Meanwhile, Seoul Forum 2026 is an event held by Seoul Economic Daily on Thursday and Friday to mark its 66th anniversary. This year, under the theme "New Core, New Industry," it focuses on the industrial paradigm shift triggered by AI. Korean scholars and overseas experts closely connected to Korean companies gather in one place to examine the competitiveness and direction of Korean industry from a global perspective and explore ways to expand cooperation.
On Friday, the second day of the event, the program begins with special lectures by Professor Lee Su-in of the University of Washington and Rebellions CEO Park Sung-hyun, followed by in-depth discussions on structural changes across industries centered on three major themes: robotics and manufacturing, bio and medicine, and virtual simulation. Special events are also held, including the "Robotics Venture Forum," which discusses investment attraction and global expansion for domestic robot venture firms, and the "AI and Human Values Forum," which examines the ethics and social responsibility that AI development will bring, offering a multidimensional view of balanced development between technology and society.
