- Rebellions is pitching telcos on lower-cost AI inference, claiming its systems can cut capex, opex and power use versus Nvidia-heavy infrastructure
- SK Telecom is the proof point: after nearly three years in deployment, Rebellions says it has built a telco AI playbook
- The startup is leaning into open-source AI software — including vLLM, OpenShift and PyTorch — to help customers avoid lock-in
Korean chip startup Rebellions has quietly spent the past three years in the telco trenches, building industry knowledge and a playbook of best practices through its work building an AI stack with SK Telecom. Now, it’s taking its inferencing pitch to global, pairing its field experience with an open source-first software strategy it said can help carriers move faster without locking scarce engineering talent into yet another proprietary AI stack.
Marshall Choy, Rebellions’ CBO, told Fierce that the company is in conversations with between 10 and 20 operators around the world. While he didn’t specify where these operators are located, he noted Rebellions has been very selective about where it has established office locations and staffing: Korea, Japan, Singapore, Saudi Arabia and the United States.
Rebellions’ work with SK Telecom has served as a foundational pillar of its engagement with other operators, he added.
“Our systems have been deployed at SKT for nearly three years,” Choy said. “What does that mean? It means three years of lessons learned, institutional knowledge gain, product improvement and deep engagement with an end user customer working on real problems… It’s three years of blood sweat and tears that has become institutional knowledge.”
The operators in its pipeline are in “different stages of engagement and deployment” with Rebellions, Choy said, teasing there will be “more to come on that.” While SK Telecom has been its most publicized partner to date, Choy said over the next 12 months Rebellions plans to highlight more of what has been going on behind the scenes. And that, he added, includes work with other telecom operators as well as neoclouds, enterprises and governments.
What is Rebellion's elevator pitch?
The company’s pitch is simple: deliver the best performance per dollar per watt possible for inferencing and lower both capex and opex associated with running AI infrastructure.
On the performance front, Choy said it is focused on delivering low-latency, high throughput compute. On the per dollar front, it’s targeting a price point that is half or a third as expensive as Nvidia kit. And on the wattage front, Rebellions is serving up compute with much lower power consumption. Choy said its average is 4 kilowatts per system or about 20 kilowatts per rack, compared to the 120+ kilowatts per rack consumed by Nvidia’s DGX GB200 NVL72 system.
That reduction in power consumption translates to a 6x savings on opex, Choy said. It also means telcos can look at deploying Rebellions’ kit in smaller facilities with a tighter power budget. Think old central offices and the like. By adding fresh compute to such locations to serve tokens, Choy argued telcos can extend the life of – and ROI on – existing assets.
“Our goal is to reduce the unit economics of AI inferencing to near zero,” Choy said. While he admitted that sounds strange coming from an AI inferencing chip company, Choy explained that it’s all about making AI accessible for even more use cases – the ones where the math doesn’t work out today.
“If you’re a telephone operator and you have an existing line card of services you provide, I can make you more profitable because I can lower your costs. But more strategically, what I can do is I can enable you to introduce a lower tier of services at a lower cost, which then makes AI inferencing accessible to a whole set of applications where it was previously too expensive,” he said.
That’s the trade-off Rebellions is betting on, lower unit economics but more volume.
It's not the only one working in this direction. Groq and SambaNova are similarly working on chips to reduce the cost of inferencing. OpenAI appears to be moving in a similar vein with its Jalapeño chip.
An open-source approach to solving the skills gap
But Rebellions is also addressing another telco pain point beyond cost: the skills gap.
Through its work with SK Telecom and others, Choy said Rebellions has learned that customers aren’t just looking for hardware or software but for fully optimized infrastructure that cuts across both. That’s where Rebellions’ open-source ethos comes into play.
“We didn’t want to have this mainframe model where everything is custom and bespoke and we’re this weird thing off in the side of the data center that doesn’t get touched by anything else,” Choy said. “It’s all about interoperability and integration.”
Choy said the company is dedicated to using open-source software – everything from vLLM and OpenShift to PyTorch – with a “no forks” rule. The rule is designed to help customers avoid skills issues and ensure engineers don’t have to learn non-transferrable skills just to use its equipment.
That’s great news for telcos, Choy said. “Let’s be honest, the telcos don’t necessarily have all the right skills in place,” he said. “So, being able to spread that across more of an open-source ecosystem means they can be in service and productive faster.”
Read more about AI inferencing here:
Here’s why SK Telecom is building its own AI stack
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SambaNova targets AI inference boom with chips built for existing data centers