A visit to an industrial park or a high-tech factory is rarely absent from Xi Jinping’s itinerary when he travels across China, as he continually stresses the importance of achieving technological self-reliance. In turn, companies like chipmaker Biren Technology are earning backing from some of the country’s largest financial institutions.
Biren, one of China’s newest startups in the critical field of advanced chips, already boasts products with capabilities only narrowly behind those of its leading American competitor, Nvidia. The company could be set for stock market listing in Hong Kong as soon as this year, according to reports.
This week, The Wire profiles Biren Technology, a company dedicated to research and development of powerful chips that China desperately seeks to design domestically to counter increasingly onerous U.S. export controls.
HIGH POWER, HIGH STAKES
Biren Technology specializes in graphic processing units (GPU), high-performing chips whose immense processing power makes them well suited for machine learning and data analysis. Although GPUs are named for their use in image processing, their ability to process data many times faster than central processing units (CPU) makes them highly valuable for artificial intelligence computing. The world’s leading company in GPU design is currently Nvidia, headquartered in California.
“GPUs have become the…workhorse [computing] hardware base for AI applications,” says Paul Triolo, global technology policy lead at consulting firm Albright Stonebridge Group.
Zhang Wen, former president of Chinese AI company SenseTime, co-founded Biren Technology in 2019 along with Lingjie Xu, a U.S. educated former senior GPU architect at Nvidia. The company was founded at a time when the trade war between the U.S. and China was escalating, affecting the ability of Chinese tech companies like Huawei, ZTE and others to access the world’s most advanced chips. In October 2019, a group of Chinese state-owned enterprises injected more than 200 billion renminbi into a semiconductor development fund for homegrown Chinese companies, twice the amount the fund had when it started in 2014.
Biren defines its mission as the pursuit of a dream — the “China chip” — and has mentioned this goal repeatedly at product launches, industry conferences and in state media interviews that founder Zhang has given.
“The niche Biren fills is that they have the best architecture in China,” says Dylan Patel, chief analyst at semiconductor consultancy SemiAnalysis. “Their chips are more targeted at data centers. The architecture they have is actually pretty good for large language models,” he adds, referring to deep learning algorithms such as ChatGPT that can recognize, predict and generate text.
Biren unveiled its flagship product — the BR100 GPGPU — in August 2022, with the company claiming the chip had set a record for computing power globally. Industry analysts conclude that while the BR100’s speed still trails that of Nvidia’s H100 chip, which was released in the same year, it outstrips Nvidia’s prior generation GPU, the A100.
The BR100 was “claiming to be…2.6 times faster than the A100 for various types of workloads that they benchmarked it against,” explains Triolo. “Keep in mind, this is just their first generation.”
But hardware design is not the only factor in judging how competitive Biren is compared with Nvidia, Triolo adds, pointing out that Nvidia works closely with its customers to develop applications for the hardware.
While Biren’s design capabilities have proven formidable, China still lacks the domestic manufacturing capacity to produce such chips at the level of the industry leader — TSMC in Taiwan. In October 2022, after the U.S. imposed export controls against China for computer chips at the most advanced performance level, TSMC froze its business relationship with Biren, according to a Bloomberg report.
“My understanding is that Biren cannot ship those [chips] any more and they need to do a rework on internal China…process technology, like SMIC’s process technology, rather than TSMC’s, which is a big step back,” says Patel. SMIC refers to Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation, China’s leading domestic semiconductor manufacturer.
Relying only on domestic manufacturing will make it difficult for Chinese chip designers like Biren to stay competitive internationally. “If they can’t access and continue to use TSMC, they’re in a real world of hurt,” says Triolo.
After the export controls were announced, Patel noted that Biren changed the specifications of the BR100 on its website, reducing its performance capability in an apparent attempt to make the chip exportable under the new rules. However, the newly disabled features appear to remain on the chip, with no means to verify that they could not be reactivated later, says Patel.
“In reality, there was no way to prove that the chips that they were shipping met the regulations,” Patel says.
FLOATING BIREN
Biren is preparing for a listing application on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange as soon as this year, Bloomberg reported in July. Some analysts believe that this indicates Biren’s relationship with TSMC may have resumed in some capacity, although TSMC has never commented publicly on its arrangements with the company.
“If it was the case that Biren were completely cut off from TSMC, I would think that would be a really hard thing for them…to then consider IPO-ing,” says Triolo. “I assume as part of the IPO process that there would have to be some transparency in terms of that issue.”
At this point, investing in a really capable Chinese GPU company like Biren is almost a no-brainer on the Chinese side.
Paul Triolo, global technology policy lead at consulting firm Albright Stonebridge Group
While the U.S. restrictions may have dented Biren’s business partnerships outside China, the company appears poised for an increasingly significant role in its domestic market.
“Arguably, if the U.S. hadn’t been considering all these controls on semiconductors, you probably still would have had a GPU industry developed in China, but…the urgency and the speed I don’t think you would have seen,” Triolo says.
“At this point, investing in a really capable Chinese GPU company like Biren is almost a no-brainer on the Chinese side,” he adds.
Read below to find out some of the top venture capital firms which have invested in Biren:
Aaron Mc Nicholas is a journalist based in Washington DC. He was previously based in Hong Kong, where he worked at Bloomberg and at Storyful, a news agency dedicated to verifying newsworthy social media content. He earned a Master of Arts in Asian Studies at Georgetown University and a Bachelor of Arts in Journalism from Dublin City University in Ireland.
