Biren Technology has just banked ¥1.5 billion ($209 million) in a fresh funding round as it gears up for a Hong Kong IPO—an important bet on homegrown AI chips now that U.S. processors are off-limits.
According to people familiar with the deal, Biren's latest fundraising values the company at ¥15.5 billion ($2.15 billion) post-money, up from ¥14 billion before the round.
State-backed investors joined private backers to support development of the company's next-generation GPUs, which aim to rival Nvidia's (NVDA, Financial) and AMD's (AMD, Financial) hardware now barred from export to China.
Biren sold about ¥400 million ($56 million) of chips last year and plans to file for an IPO in Hong Kong as soon as August.
With U.S. export controls banning advanced AI processors—including Nvidia's H100 and H20 series and AMD's top-end accelerators—Chinese cloud providers and tech giants have little choice but to lean on domestic suppliers.
Biren's 2022 BR100 launch claimed parity with Nvidia's H100, positioning it as the poster child for China's semiconductor self-sufficiency push. Its success—or failure—could set the tone for a broader local chip industry forced to innovate without TSMC's foundry access.
Biren's founders, former SenseTime president Zhang Wen and ex-Qualcomm/Huawei engineer Jiao Guofang, are wagering that enough capital and state support can overcome manufacturing hurdles.
