Rebellions Inc. building a chip for saving microseconds in trading

A South Korean startup is planning to build a microchip that can be used to cut down precious milliseconds in trading. The company, Rebellions Inc., was set up six months ago in Seoul by Park Sunghyun, who used to work as a quant developer at Morgan Stanley in New York with two other partners. The chip being designed is planned to be precisely developed only fortrading purpose and run artificial intelligence that could cut precious millionths of a second off automatic-trading machines' reaction times.

This is a bold claim, as the current systems are already very fast, and cutting down further is not that easy. It could also be a big deal if it comes out as planned. "An AI chip could halve the microseconds needed to make the orders. There are some companies that just continue to stick to the technology they are used to, we want to change that," said Park Sunghyun, the CEO of Rebellions.The technology Rebellions is developing is called an application-specific integrated circuit, or ASIC, a dedicated chip that is built for purpose rather than a general-purpose chip like Intel or AMD.

Rebellions islooking to quadruple its 20-person workforce by 2023. Also, TSMC has agreed to produce the chips by 2022. "There's a lot of money in the market with rates so low. South Korea is home to chip giants like Samsung, and the age of artificial intelligence is coming. It is the perfect time to do business," said Park.A few investment banks and quantitative trading firms are in talks to use them, Park said.