AI chip startup Rebellions has partnered with ai& for deployment in Japan, with ai& targeting purchases of up to 100 units of Rebellions’ RebelRack infrastructure.
South Korean AI chip startup Rebellions has partnered with Japanese AI company ai& to deploy its RebelRack AI infrastructure platform. The initial rollout will take place at ai&’s Tokyo data center, with plans to purchase up to 100 units.
The deployment will scale alongside ai&’s broader data center expansion. The Japanese firm has already committed $2 billion in infrastructure capital, with five sites expected to become operational by the end of 2026. ai& is targeting 40MW of total capacity by year-end 2027.
Once deployed, the RebelRack infrastructure will be made available to enterprises, government institutions, and developers across Japan. This expansion aims to bolster locally available compute resources in support of the Japanese government’s sovereign AI ambitions.
“The economics of inference directly influence how widely AI can be deployed and how much it can be used,” says Sunghyun Park, co-founder and CEO, Rebellions. “Lowering the unit cost of serving tokens gives providers room to create new pricing tiers, support more applications, and serve customers with different compute requirements and budgets.
“ai& has built a heterogeneous infrastructure platform around that flexibility. Establishing Rebellions inside Japan gives us a direct path to enterprise, government, and developer demand while adding efficient inference capacity to the country’s AI infrastructure.”
David Bennett, co-founder and CEO of ai&, added: “Heterogeneous infrastructure means using the right hardware for the right workload. Rebellions fits that model — its efficiency gives us more flexibility in how we structure the economics of our services, and it builds on the same open-source frameworks our engineers already use. This partnership expands the inference options we can offer customers in Japan, with a foundation to take it further.”
Founded in 2020, Rebellions specializes in AI inference accelerators designed for energy efficiency and low-latency performance. The company began mass-producing its Atom and Atom Max NPUs for running large language models in data centers in 2023, followed by the March 2026 launch of its RebelRack and RebelRock AI platforms.
The RebelRack provides a production-ready unit of inference compute, while the RebelPod integrates multiple racks into a scalable cluster engineered for large-scale AI deployment.
In March 2026, the company announced it had secured $400 million in a pre-IPO funding round led by Mirae Asset Financial Group and the Korea National Growth Fund. The investment brought Rebellions’ total funding to $850 million, valuing the company at approximately $2.34 billion.