Biren Technology

Biren Technology is a startup from the PRC, founded in 2019 and engaged in the development of video accelerators.

History

2022

Firing a third of employees due to U.S. sanctions

On October 27, 2022, it became known that Biren Technology, China's largest GPU developer, was forced to make a serious reduction in staff. This is a consequence of the introduction of the next package of US sanctions.

In accordance with the export control measures approved by the US authorities, the supply of a wide range of components for Chinese supercomputers is prohibited. In addition, it is impossible to ship certain semiconductor chips to the PRC, manufactured anywhere in the world using equipment of American origin.

Biren Technology Fires a Third of Employees Amid U.S. Sanctions

At the same time, Biren Technology specializes specifically in high-performance computing solutions, including AI accelerators for supercomputers. For example, the flagship Biren BR100 product with 77 billion transistors can compete with NVIDIA A100 and H100 products when performing certain tasks. The manufacture of chips commissioned by Biren Technology was carried out by the Taiwanese TSMC.

It is not yet clear whether Biren Technology accelerators are subject to US sanctions restrictions, since the developer does not disclose full information about the performance of his devices. But in this situation, the contract manufacturer TSMC decided to play it safe and stop shipping the corresponding chips. This was a serious blow to the business of Biren Technology, which is now forced to cut up to a third of all staff.

The dismissal of employees will lead to the fact that the company will have to revise the schedule for the development and launch of new products on the commercial market. And so Biren Technology risks losing the potential to compete with AMD and NVIDIA in China's high-performance computing market. Moreover, now it is the PRC that is the key sales region for the company, and reorienting to other countries may take too long. Thus, the developer's future does not look too bright.^[1][2]

TSMC banned from releasing chips for Biren Technology

The US authorities have banned the Taiwanese company TSMC from fulfilling orders from the Chinese company Biren Technology. This became known on October 24, 2022. The decision follows a recent move by the U.S. government to increase controls on the export of U.S. chipmaking equipment to China^[3].

For less than four years of existence, the company has raised at least $3 billion in investments in three rounds.

According to Bloomberg, TSMC stopped producing chips for Biren Technology after the US authorities learned that this company had created a more powerful accelerator compared to the Nvidia A100. As specified, Biren Technology has created its accelerators, first of all, not to compete with the Nvidia A100, but to replace these chips in the Chinese market. As of October 2022, their supplies to the PRC were completely stopped.

Biren Technology's range includes several graphics chips, including flagship BR100 and BR104 models. They are adapted to work in the field of artificial intelligence. In particular, they are used in computer vision. According to Biren itself, the chip BR104 1.58 times faster than the Nvidia A100.

Biren does not specify what technical process TSMC used to release its chips. It is possible that the same BR104 requires state-of-the-art standards, for example, 4 nm, available only to TSMC and Samsung. Whether Biren will turn to the latter is unknown^[4].

Notes