According to news on December 6, according to a recent report by Bloomberg, Chinese GPU manufacturer Biren Technology recently received an investment of approximately 2 billion yuan (approximately US$280 million) from an investment institution supported by the Guangzhou government, providing Biren Technology with sufficient funds to maintain operations. However, the shareholder information of Biren Technology has not changed yet. Biren Technology has not officially announced the financing information.
On October 17 this year, the U.S. Biden administration officially introduced a series of new restrictions, including restrictions on the export of more advanced artificial intelligence (AI) chips and semiconductor equipment to China, and included 13 Chinese companies, including Moore Thread and its subsidiaries and Biren Technology and its subsidiaries, on the entity list. This has also brought difficulties to the subsequent development of two domestic GPU manufacturers, Biren Technology and Moore Thread.
Due to U.S. restrictions, Moore Thread and Biren Technology are currently unable to use the advanced processes of overseas wafer foundries for chip manufacturing. In the future, they may need to modify the chip design and switch to domestic processes for manufacturing, which may affect the performance of the chips.
It is worth noting that news in mid-November this year showed that Moore Threads had completed a new round of financing. It is reported that this round of financing of Moore Thread is a B+ round of financing, with a financing amount of hundreds of millions of yuan. Now, Biren Technology has also received a new round of financing of approximately 2 billion yuan. After being sanctioned, these two domestic GPU manufacturers were able to quickly obtain financial support from investors to ensure subsequent operations, which also highlighted investors' optimism for their technical capabilities.
According to the data, Biren Technology was founded on September 9, 2019 and is committed to developing original general-purpose computing systems. Its development path is to first focus on general-purpose intelligent computing in the cloud, gradually catch up with existing solutions in many fields such as artificial intelligence training and reasoning, graphics rendering, and high-performance general-purpose computing, and achieve a breakthrough in domestic high-end general-purpose intelligent computing chips.
On August 9, 2022, BiRen Technology released its first general-purpose GPU chip BR100, independent original architecture BiRen, OAM server Haixuan, as well as OAM module BiLing 100, PCIe board product BiLing 104, and the independently developed BIRENSUPA software platform. According to reports, the BR100 chip has set a global computing power record (its INT8 computing power reaches 2048TOPS, BF16 computing power reaches 1024TFLOPS, TF32+ computing power reaches 512TFLOPS, and FP32 computing power reaches 256TFLOPS) , the peak computing power is more than three times that of the flagship products sold by international manufacturers, setting a domestic interconnection bandwidth record. It is also the first general-purpose GPU chip in China to adopt chiplet technology, the first to adopt the new generation host interface PCIe5.0, and the first to support the CXL interconnection protocol.