Biren Technology, a Chinese AI GPU designer, has recently obtained an investment of ¥2 billion (approximately $280 million USD) from investors backed by the Guangzhou government, reports Bloomberg . This investment follows the company's inclusion into the U.S. government's Entity List over a year ago and layoffs to cut costs . With $280 million, the company has enough funds for ongoing operations.
Biren is also negotiating with Hong Kong for additional financing and is contemplating establishing a regional presence. Now that Chinese companies cannot obtain high-performance AI processors from overseas companies, domestic developers like Biren have a chance to thrive as demand for their chips from Chinese cloud service providers and enterprises is almost guaranteed. Therefore, the company will likely continue receiving money from Chinese investors. In fact, earlier this year, Biren considered listing on the Hong Kong stock exchange.
The addition of Biren to the U.S. Department of Commerce's Entity List posed significant challenges to the company, limiting Biren's access to TSMC's leading-edge process technologies. Biren's key challenge is ensuring a steady supply of its AI GPUs, possibly from China-based fab SMIC. To do so, Biren has to redesign its BR104 ASIC for SMIC's 2nd generation 7nm-class process technology or develop a new chip from scratch. Meanwhile, whether a Biren ASIC made by SMIC will be as competitive as its BR104 made by TSMC remains to be seen.
| Header Cell - Column 0 | Biren BR104 | Biren BR100 | Nvidia A100 | Nvidia H100 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Form-Factor | FHFL Card | OAM Module | SXM4 | SXM5 |
| Transistor Count | ? | 77 billion | 54.2 billion | 80 billion |
| Node | N7 | N7 | N7 | 4N |
| Power | 300W | 550W | 400W | 700W |
| FP32 TFLOPS | 128 | 256 | 19.5 | 60 |
| TF32+ TFLOPS | 256 | 512 | ? | ? |
| TF32 TFLOPS | ? | ? | 156/312* | 500/1000* |
| FP16 TFLOPS | ? | ? | 78 | 120 |
| FP16 TFLOPS Tensor | ? | ? | 312/624* | 1000/2000* |
| BF16 TFLOPS | 512 | 1024 | 39 | 120 |
| BF16 TFLOPS Tensor | ? | ? | 312/624* | 1000/2000* |
| INT8 | 1024 | 2048 | ? | ? |
| INT8 TFLOPS Tensor | ? | ? | 624/1248* | 2000/4000* |
The context of Biren's funding and expansion efforts is a larger shift in the Chinese technology sector. Major firms like Baidu are pivoting towards domestic AI chip providers in response to increasing U.S. restrictions on China's access to state-of-the-art semiconductor technology.
Biren is not alone in getting additional funds from Chinese investors in light of the U.S. crackdown on China's semiconductor industry in general and AI and HPC processors in particular. Other blacklisted Chinese startups, such as Moore Threads, are also gaining traction and investments, according to Bloomberg.
