Rebellions Sets Up Singapore Unit to Target Southeast Asian AI Data Centers

* Editor's note: AI PRISM (Personalized Report & Insight Summarizing Media) is an artificial intelligence-based personalized news recommendation and summary service developed with support from the Korea Press Foundation. It selects and provides six news items tailored to each reader type.

1. [Exclusive] Rebellions Plants Flag in Singapore as K-NPU Makers Race for Asian Infrastructure

- Key summary: South Korean AI chipmaker Rebellions completed procedures in July to establish a local unit in Singapore and is speeding up its push into the Southeast Asian market. Initial capital was set at 1 million Singapore dollars (about 1.06 billion won), and Shin Sung-kyu, Rebellions' chief financial officer, was registered as head of the local unit. It is the company's fourth overseas unit after Japan, Saudi Arabia and the United States. Rebellions plans to win customers among local governments, companies and AI data center (AIDC) operators, and is also hiring Singaporean engineers. FuriosaAI recently launched a Singapore unit as well and plans to begin sales of its second-generation neural processing unit (NPU), extending the rivalry between the two companies into a race for early position in Asia's AI infrastructure market.

2. [Exclusive] Kakao Raises 'AI Sail' in Busan, to Build Talent and Startup Hub This Year

- Key summary: Kakao will build the Kakao AI Sail Center in Busan this year to nurture AI talent and support startups. The company has chosen Asti Busan, an officetel — a studio unit used as either a home or an office — near Busan Station as its base, and will fit out about 230 pyeong of space with a large event hall, a mid-size lecture room, an investor relations (IR) room and an open lounge. Kakao AI Sail is a project organization formed by Kakao together with the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), the Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology (GIST), the Daegu Gyeongbuk Institute of Science and Technology (DGIST) and the Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology (UNIST), with the Busan center as its first base. The center will run programs for each growth stage on an ongoing basis, including startup boot camps, joint research on AX (AI transformation), proof of concept (PoC) work, demo days and technology mentoring, while also identifying challenges in the region's core industries such as ports, logistics, tourism and manufacturing.

3. Shinhan Encodes 'S-Grade' Department Heads' Know-How Into AI

- Key summary: Shinhan Financial Group launched a "department head persona agent" project last month to accumulate the work experience and judgment of its top-rated department heads in AI. A total of 11 departments are taking part in the pilot, including five at Shinhan Bank and two each at Shinhan Card, Shinhan Securities and Shinhan Life. Each department head forms a two-person team with a junior employee capable of AI engineering to design an agent directly, and Shinhan Financial plans to support "vibe coding," in which functions are instructed in natural language to generate and revise code. Shinhan Financial aims to review prototypes stage by stage from this month through November and share final results in early December. If the effects are confirmed, it will consider widening the scope across the group next year.

4. From Music Rights to Electricity: Battle for Token Securities' Killer Products Begins

- Key summary: Brokerages are moving quickly to prepare differentiation strategies ahead of the opening of the token securities (STO) era in February next year. Their blueprint is to first verify system stability and trust with conventional securities permitted in the early stage of the system — private money market funds (MMFs) for institutional investors, high-grade private bonds and unlisted shares — before expanding into alternative assets such as music copyrights, carbon emission credits and renewable energy infrastructure. Shinhan Securities signed a contract with Musicow to manage a 40 billion won music intellectual property (IP) fund, and ideas under discussion include securitizing future power sales proceeds from power plants, ships and data centers, and slicing real estate project financing (PF) into pieces sold for tens of thousands of won. Major institutions including Boston Consulting Group (BCG) expect the global market to expand to between $16 trillion and $30 trillion by 2030.

5. [Exclusive] CU Widens Beauty Push, to Make Cosmetics With Peripera

- Key summary: Convenience store chain CU will release beauty products in October using its brand character "CU Friends" in collaboration with beauty brand Peripera. CU provides the character IP while Peripera handles product planning and launch — the first time in the industry that a convenience store has supplied its own brand to a beauty brand for commercialization. The collaboration products will be sold through major beauty distribution channels such as Olive Young, and the companies plan to pursue overseas markets including Japan and Canada. CU's cosmetics sales growth accelerated from 16.5% in 2024 to 20.9% last year, then to 33.6% in January-August this year, while the number of its beauty-focused stores topped 1,000 this month, reaching its year-end target ahead of schedule.

6. Build Your Own or Share a Platform? Interoperability Is Key for Token Securities Infrastructure

- Key summary: Ahead of the institutionalization of token securities next year, brokerages are forming alliances across borders and business lines. Mirae Asset Group acquired a 97.15% stake in Digital X, the operator of Korbit, through Mirae Asset Consulting in July, while Korea Investment & Securities secured about 20% of Coinone and Hanwha Investment & Securities (003530.KS) raised its stake in Dunamu to 9.84%. Issuance infrastructure is splitting between proprietary systems and shared platforms. Mirae Asset Securities (006800.KS) has developed its own mainnet through Next Finance Initiative (NFI), and Samsung Securities (016360.KS) is preparing a distributed ledger based on Besu, an Ethereum-family platform. By contrast, 12 brokerages including Kiwoom and Daishin Securities (003540.KS) have joined Koscom's shared platform KoSTO to split construction costs. With approaches diverging, transferring assets between different distributed ledgers and managing total issuance volume have emerged as challenges, while the Korea Exchange consortium (KDX) and the Nextrade consortium (NXT) have applied for final approval as over-the-counter brokers for fractional investment products, moving to secure an early lead in the secondary market.