Rebellions' Middle East business, which had stalled due to the war between the United States and Iran, is gaining momentum again. The chip startup has recruited a former diplomat known as a Middle East expert, while CEO Park Sung-hyun has resumed his travel schedule to the region, signaling a renewed effort to court Middle Eastern capital.
According to industry sources Tuesday, Rebellions appointed Moon Byung-jun, former chargé d'affaires to Saudi Arabia, as an advisor last month. Moon's role at Rebellions is strategic advisor for Middle East and North Africa business. The appointment reflects Rebellions' intent to leverage the local network Moon built during his diplomatic career to pursue public and private sector projects across the Middle East and Arab world.
Moon is a former senior public official who retired from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in December last year and is regarded as a Middle East specialist. During his time at the ministry, he served as director of the Middle East Division 2, consul general in Dubai, and chargé d'affaires to Saudi Arabia. In May this year, he was appointed as a special envoy of the foreign minister in a civilian capacity, visiting Kuwait, Bahrain, and Iraq to discuss industrial cooperation between Korea and the countries he visited.
Park, Rebellions' CEO, has also recently resumed his on-site schedule in the Middle East. Park traveled to the Saudi capital Riyadh early this month. On Saturday, he attended a forum gathering Saudi venture capital (VC) firms and software companies, where he gave a presentation introducing Rebellions' second-generation neural processing unit (NPU) product, "Rebel 100," promoting the NPU product to local companies. Moon also visited Saudi Arabia during this period and appears to have participated in Rebellions' business schedule alongside Park.
Next month, Jennifer Glore, senior vice president in charge of products at Rebellions, will appear as a speaker at the "LEAP East" event. LEAP is the largest technology exhibition in the Middle East, led by Saudi Arabia. LEAP East, which Glore will attend, is the East Asian edition of LEAP and will be held in Hong Kong. At the technology exchange exhibition for companies in the Middle East and East Asia, Rebellions plans to showcase the industrial potential of its NPU.
Rebellions completed its preparations for a full-scale entry into the Middle East market last year. In August last year, the company established a local subsidiary in Saudi Arabia, laying the foundation for its Middle East business. As Middle Eastern companies mobilizing vast capital take interest in artificial intelligence (AI) businesses and push to build large-scale data centers, Rebellions, which develops NPUs for data centers, also views this market as a key overseas business hub.
Rebellions' Middle East business has achieved some results. At "Seoul Forum 2026," hosted by Seoul Economic Daily last month, Park appeared as a keynote speaker and said, "Rebellions' NPU is being used to run Aramco's own large language model (LLM)."
However, when war broke out between the United States and Iran in February this year and the flames of war spread across the entire Middle East region, Rebellions' business was temporarily disrupted. After the United States and Iran agreed to a ceasefire in April, the company began its renewed push into the Middle East.
Rebellions focuses on making AI inference semiconductor chips. The company highlights NPUs, which deliver superior inference performance with less power compared to Nvidia's graphics processing units (GPUs), as its main product. In his keynote speech at Seoul Forum 2026, Park stressed, "Energy efficiency will be important for AI infrastructure going forward," adding, "Rebellions has 5 to 7 times the efficiency of Nvidia products."
