Biren Technology, founded by former employees of NVIDIA, Qualcomm, and Alibaba in Shanghai in 2019, aimed to rival companies such as NVIDIA and AMD by developing a graphics processing unit and producing graphics cards. The company was able to raise more than $726 million in funding, but one of the co-founders left the company early on.
Chinese graphics card manufacturer Biren Technology stumbled at the beginning!
Biren Technology had announced its goal of competing with NVIDIA’s Ampere A100 and Hopper H100 platforms last August, and later announced two new high-performance computing GPU models called BR100 and BR104. The GPU specifications and performance graphics presented by the company during its launch were impressive. However, the company faced tough US sanctions in October, which forced it to slow down.
Despite this setback, the company had signed a contract with TSMC to produce and sell its new GPUs under the Biren series. However, due to the new conditions brought by the sanctions, TSMC withdrew from the agreement, leaving Biren in the lurch.
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As a result, the company had to lay off one-third of its employees because it anticipated that the planned schedule would be delayed by at least a few years. The remaining engineers began working on how to release the BR100 and BR104 GPUs using older production technologies such as 12nm instead of 7nm.
The company overcame these difficulties by lowering its performance and efficiency expectations and completed work on bringing the new chips into production. However, Golf Jiao, the co-founder of the company who claimed that they could rival NVIDIA and AMD in gaming and general desktop tasks, left the company, saying that he could not realize his plans under these conditions. Therefore, the dream of China and Biren Technology’s founders of producing graphics cards is currently on hold.
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