NVIDIA, Rebellions, and SK Telecom announced a collaboration to advance Korea's sovereign AI infrastructure, using NVIDIA NVLink Fusion to bring together NVIDIA's open infrastructure platform, Rebellions' Korean-designed AI processors, and SK Telecom's AI data center, model, and service capabilities.

Korean Chipmakers and Telecom Giant Join Forces With NVIDIA

As part of the agreement, Rebellions will use NVLink Fusion to connect its Rebel R200 neural processing units (NPUs) to the NVIDIA platform and harness the NVIDIA MGX rack architecture for rack-scale system development. SK Telecom plans to deploy these systems in its AI data center, drawing on its AI data center operations expertise, proprietary models, and services.

The collaboration aims to support AI services tailored to Korea's language, industries, and priorities, connecting Korean semiconductor development with the systems and operational capabilities needed to deliver AI at scale.

According to the company, SK Telecom's deployment supports its vision for full-stack sovereign AI spanning infrastructure, proprietary models, and public-facing services, including those under Korea's "AI for All" project.

Industry Leaders Frame the Collaboration

Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA, said Korea has the talent, technology, and industrial ambition to become a world leader in AI. "Sovereign AI gives nations the power to turn their language, culture, and expertise into intelligence," Huang said.

"With NVLink Fusion, Korea's chipmakers can connect their custom ASICs to NVIDIA's AI factory platform, tightly coupling their processors with NVIDIA compute to run AI workloads. Together with MSIT, Rebellions, and SK Telecom, we're building the computing foundation for Korea to produce its own intelligence and power its next industrial revolution."

Sunghyun Park, cofounder and CEO of Rebellions, described this as a turning point that opens a new chapter for sovereign AI by connecting Korea's AI silicon and models with global systems technology.

Park said that by integrating Rebellions' purpose-built silicon and system design with NVIDIA's NVLink Fusion, high-speed interconnects and rack-scale design expertise, and SK Telecom's model and data center operations capabilities, the companies will deliver low-latency and energy-efficient inference for frontier models at scale. "As a leading Korean AI silicon startup, we will lead the charge to establish Korean technology as a core pillar powering AI worldwide," Park said.

Jung Jai-hun, president and CEO of SK Telecom, said the collaboration validates the potential of next-generation sovereign AI infrastructure by combining global AI infrastructure technology with Korean AI semiconductors.

"By linking SKT's AI data centers, proprietary AI models including A.X K2, and public-facing AI services developed under the 'AI for All' project, we will strengthen our full-stack sovereign AI competitiveness and contribute to the growth of Korea's AI ecosystem," Jai-hun said.

Scaling Silicon Innovation With NVIDIA's Open Platform

NVLink Fusion extends NVIDIA's vertically integrated, horizontally open AI platform to custom XPUs. It enables chipmakers to combine specialized silicon with NVIDIA's high-bandwidth, low-latency scale-up networking and established infrastructure ecosystem, helping improve performance, reduce deployment risk and accelerate time to market.

Rebellions is developing its next-generation R200 NPU, optimized for low-latency and energy-efficient inference using frontier models, including multitrillion-parameter mixture-of-experts models. Through NVLink Fusion, Rebellions will connect its R200 NPUs within a rack through NVIDIA NVLink scale-up networking.

The NVIDIA MGX rack architecture and reference designs will support development of the systems, while the MGX ecosystem gives Rebellions access to an established supply chain of original design manufacturers and component suppliers.

Connecting Infrastructure, Models and Services

SK Telecom brings experience building and operating AI data centers, alongside its proprietary foundation models and public-facing AI services. Building on its long-standing collaboration with NVIDIA in AI development and sovereign infrastructure, SK Telecom plans to connect these capabilities and deploy them in its AI data center using the standardized MGX rack architecture to deliver full-stack sovereign AI.

The MGX rack architecture provides a foundation for GPU and NPU systems to share data center design elements, including rack footprint, power delivery and cooling. This approach can support infrastructure planning alongside Rebellions' processor and system development.

A Planned Approach to Disaggregated Inference

The companies plan to develop an approach to disaggregated inference, assigning different stages of AI response generation to the processor architecture best suited to each task. Their planned work includes using NVIDIA GPUs for prefill and Rebellions NPUs for decode to improve inference throughput and power efficiency.

SK Telecom plans to connect this infrastructure with its proprietary foundation models and public-facing services, including those under the government's AI for All project, to advance its full-stack sovereign AI strategy.

Government Support for Sovereign AI

MSIT is supporting the collaboration, which the companies say aims to connect domestic semiconductor innovation with infrastructure for sovereign AI. The ministry's involvement ties the partnership to Korea's broader ambitions of producing its own intelligence through domestic chips, data centers and models, with the three companies positioning the effort as a computing foundation for what Huang called Korea's next industrial revolution.

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