The USA, which has imposed an embargo on products of Chinese origin, has also blacklisted Biren, which produces AI chips, in recent months. Recently, Biren Technology announced that they had recently secured an investment of ¥2 billion (approximately US$280 million) from investors backed by the Guangzhou government.
New era for AI chips: Biren Technology received investment
The USA, which banned the export of AI chips to China, caused the revenues of many companies, especially Nvidia, to decrease. Chinese technology companies, which have problems with chip imports, started to turn to alternatives such as Biren Technology.
The financing efforts of Biren, one of Nvidia’s biggest competitors, are seen as a major change in the Chinese technology sector. Major firms like aidu are turning to domestic AI chip makers in response to growing U.S. restrictions on China’s access to cutting-edge semiconductor technology.
It is stated that the most important challenge faced by Biren is to ensure a stable supply of AI chips from China-based SMIC. For this, Biren needs to redesign its BR104 ASIC according to SMIC’s 2nd generation 7nm class process technology or develop a new chip from scratch. We should point out that it is not yet known whether the Biren ASIC produced by SMIC will be as competitive as the BR104 produced by TSMC.
Biren is not alone in seeking additional funding from Chinese investors in light of the US crackdown on China’s semiconductor industry in general and AI and HPC processors in particular. According to the news published by Bloomberg, other blacklisted Chinese startups such as Moore Threads are also gaining interest and investment.
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