en.Wedoany.com Reported - South Korean artificial intelligence semiconductor startup Rebellion (리벨리온) announced on the 30th that it has acquired AI inference optimization specialist SqueezeBits (스퀴즈비츠), accelerating its transformation into a comprehensive AI infrastructure company spanning hardware, software, and service operations.
Through this acquisition, Rebellion plans to integrate SqueezeBits' software optimization and inference service capabilities with its neural processing unit (NPU) hardware technology to build a unified platform system. Inference services cover the complete process from receiving requests, executing models, to returning results during actual AI model operation, directly determining service speed, cost, and stability. As AI service commercialization expands across industries, system-level infrastructure integration capabilities, alongside high-performance chip development, are becoming core market competitiveness.
SqueezeBits is a deep-tech startup founded by researchers with backgrounds in AI semiconductors, deep learning, and model lightweighting. Its unique optimization technology can improve AI model operation speed and reduce operational costs across various hardware environments. Since its founding, the company has accumulated collaboration cases with global AI hardware companies such as Intel and NVIDIA in a short period, earning recognition for its technical capabilities.
The two parties have maintained a close cooperative relationship over the past two years. Since 2024, they have jointly developed model lightweighting technology and specialized software based on Rebellion's NPU, and have hosted events and seminars themed around the inference optimization open-source project "vLLM" for the Korean developer community, promoting the development of an NPU-based open-source AI ecosystem. The addition of the SqueezeBits team is expected to accelerate the generation of synergies.
Through this acquisition, Rebellion plans to maximize the software performance of its AI semiconductors while enhancing its end-to-end AI infrastructure building capabilities from hardware to services, helping customers reduce complex optimization challenges during service deployment and providing an environment for quickly and efficiently building AI services.
Previously, in 2024, Rebellion created South Korea's first integration case between AI semiconductor companies by merging with Sapeon Korea (사피온코리아). In March of this year, it was selected for the National Growth Fund (국민성장펀드) No. 1 direct investment project. This acquisition of SqueezeBits is seen as a strategic move beyond hardware, continuing its expansion toward AI industry ecosystem upgrades and sovereign AI infrastructure construction.
Rebellion CEO Park Sung-hyun (박성현) stated that when technical capabilities and outstanding talents converge across corporate boundaries, South Korea's AI infrastructure ecosystem will create new possibilities. Rebellion will evolve together with SqueezeBits into a company covering hardware, software, and system-level large-scale AI infrastructure. SqueezeBits CEO Kim Hyung-jun (김형준) stated that its AI inference optimization technology will more broadly expand the Rebellion NPU ecosystem, achieving a full-stack AI infrastructure with co-optimized hardware and software based on synergies, helping customers run AI services more easily and cost-effectively on the Rebellion NPU platform.
