Rebellions, the South Korean maker of AI chips, announced on June 30, 2026 that it is acquiring SqueezeBits, a South Korean startup that makes AI models run faster and more cheaply through compression and inference optimization.
The deal is structured as a comprehensive share swap. Rebellions takes 100% of SqueezeBits, which becomes a wholly owned subsidiary, and SqueezeBits shareholders receive Rebellions shares in return, so no large cash payment is involved. The exchange ratio and the value of the deal were not disclosed.
Korean business daily Hankyung later reported that SqueezeBits will keep operating on its own and will not be merged into Rebellions.
What SqueezeBits built
SqueezeBits was founded in March 2022 by a team built around an NPU research group at POSTECH, and it brings together AI researchers from Seoul National University, POSTECH and KAIST along with industry engineers. Its chief executive is Hyungjun Kim.
The company develops techniques for compressing and lightening AI models so that they run faster and cost less across different kinds of hardware. Soon after it was founded it worked with Intel and NVIDIA. It has recently moved into API services built on heterogeneous computing, meaning workloads that run across different types of processors.
Rebellions said SqueezeBits had been profitable for two consecutive years. Neither company disclosed its revenue or headcount.
“SqueezeBits’ AI inference optimization technology will significantly expand the reach of the Rebellions NPU ecosystem.”
A partnership that became a purchase
The two companies have worked together since 2024. They jointly developed model compression technology and dedicated software for Rebellions' neural processing units (NPUs), and they ran events and workshops for Korean developers around vLLM, an open-source framework for serving AI models efficiently.
Rebellions said that history of working together means the benefits should show up as soon as the SqueezeBits team joins. Kim said his company's technology would widen the reach of the Rebellions NPU ecosystem and help customers run AI services on Rebellions chips more easily and more cheaply.
Why Rebellions is buying
Rebellions sells NPU silicon, including its Rebel100 chip, as well as server, rack and pod systems built around it, but it wants to offer more than hardware. It is positioning itself as an integrated AI infrastructure company that offers NPU hardware, software optimization and inference serving on one platform. Inference serving covers the whole path from receiving a request to running the model and returning a result, and it determines how fast, how cheap and how reliable an AI service is.
The company argued that as AI moves into commercial use across industries, how efficiently a model runs in practice is becoming as important as the model's own performance. Buying SqueezeBits brings the optimization layer in-house.
Rebellions chief executive Sunghyun Park said Korea's AI infrastructure sector gains new possibilities when technical skill and talent come together across company lines. He said the combination would let the company span hardware, software and system-level AI infrastructure, and that it intends to prove that approach in the global market.
The investors and the bigger picture
SqueezeBits raised money mainly from strategic investors, including Naver D2SF, Kakao Ventures, Samsung NEXT, POSCO Technology Investment and POSTECH Holdings, according to Unicorn Factory. Through the share swap they become shareholders in Rebellions. The amounts they invested were not disclosed. The value of the shares they receive depends on Rebellions' own valuation; in August 2026, AI Market Watch reported that Rebellions had reached a valuation of 3 trillion won (about $2.2 billion).
Rebellions described SqueezeBits as its first acquisition. The company merged with Sapeon Korea in 2024, the first combination of two Korean AI chip companies, and in March 2026 it was chosen as the first direct investment of Korea's National Growth Fund, which cast Rebellions as a central player in the country's push to grow a "K-NVIDIA". Rebellions said the SqueezeBits deal continues that strategy of growing through combinations and supports the build-out of sovereign AI infrastructure in Korea.
