China’s Nvidia-rival Biren mulls IPO

Business news | July 21, 2023

By Peter Clarke

Artificial Intelligence AI

Shanghai Biren Intelligent Technology Co. Ltd. – a startup selling GPUs for running AI applications in data centers – is considering an initial public offering of shares in Hong Kong, according to Bloomberg.

Although founded in 2019 the company has already reached ‘unicorn’ status. But it is now trying to capitalize on domestic demand due to imposition of export controls on Nvidia’s leading-edge GPUs (see Nvidia hobbles A100 chip to meet US export control rules).

Biren hasn’t set how much money it is trying to raise through the IPO, for which the process is likely to start in the next few weeks, Bloomberg said. Biren has its own issues as it was expecting to use TSMC to manufacture its chips using a 7nm process (see Export controls see TSMC stop work on Chinese AI chip). Local foundry SMIC has been able to get close to 7nm in R&D but because it is being denied access to extreme ultraviolet lithography by export controls the process is likely to yield poorly and be expensive.

As well as planning for an IPO Biren is in talks with investors – including government-backed funds in Guangzhou – about a separate funding round to raise about 2 billion yuan (about US$279 million), Bloomberg said.

Biren is one of several Chinese startups formed to compete with Nvidia and is said to be the most promising. The company drew attention to itself when it announced its BR100 chip. It claimed the component provides over 1 petaflop of 16bit floating-point performance and over 2 petaops of 8bit fixed-point performance (see Chinese chiplet-based GPU claims performance record).

Despite the application of restrictions Biren products are now gaining traction with Chinese firms such as SenseTime Group Inc. and China Mobile Ltd.