Artificial intelligence (AI) semiconductor corporations Rebellions is joining hands with U.K. AI infrastructure startup Callosum to target the European sovereign AI market. It is also pushing to supply more than 100 Neural Processing Unit (NPU)-based computing racks to an AI research cluster supported by the U.K. government.
Rebellions said on the 26th that it will join Callosum's global heterogeneous computing integration project as one of the first global computing partners. Heterogeneous computing is a method of using different types of processors such as graphics processing units (GPUs) and NPUs together to match the characteristics of each task. Sovereign AI refers to a country or region building an independent AI ecosystem based on its own data and infrastructure.
Callosum is an AI infrastructure startup founded by Cambridge University alumni Chief Executive Daniel Akarca and Chief Technology Officer (CTO) Yasha Achterberg. It is developing software that jointly optimizes AI models and semiconductors to automatically allocate each computation job to the appropriate hardware.
Its goal is to reduce expense and power consumption by using multiple types of AI accelerators together without being tied to a specific semiconductor vendor's products. Callosum was selected as the first equity investment corporations of the U.K. government's Sovereign AI Fund and recently raised $100 million in seed funding.
Rebellions will participate in this collaboration as the Asia lead partner. The plan is to build heterogeneous AI infrastructure that combines Callosum's software with Rebellions' NPU and supply rack-level products to the U.K. and European markets.
The two companies are pursuing a plan to supply more than 100 NPU-based computing racks to an AI research cluster supported by the U.K. government. They also plan to push additional phase 2 and 3 supplies. To that end, the two companies are co-designing a reference architecture for heterogeneous computing systems that include NPUs. By integrating the Rebellions NPU into Callosum's platform, they plan to build an environment in which customers can use the NPU without going through separate software optimization work.
Through this collaboration, Rebellions aims to secure a foundation to supply NPUs as AI inference-dedicated accelerators in the European sovereign AI infrastructure market. Starting with the U.K. and Europe, the two companies plan to expand the scope of cooperation to the sovereign AI markets of other countries.
Chief Executive Park Sung-hyun of Rebellions said, "As the AI infrastructure market diversifies beyond single hardware, the partnership with Callosum and this supply are an important turning point that allows Rebellions to expand its reach and speed up its push into the sovereign AI market," adding, "Based on this, we will become a key player that provides infrastructure with performance, efficiency and a stable supply chain."
Callosum Chief Executive Daniel Akarca said, "The essence of artificial intelligence comes not from individual chips but from the 'federation' of multiple specialized systems," adding, "Rebellions' NPU will serve as a central pillar on Callosum's heterogeneous orchestration platform, boosting the performance and power efficiency of a wide range of AI inference workloads."