Chinese GPU Firm Biren Plans IPO to Better Compete Against Nvidia

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Despite sanctions and severe problems, Biren plans IPO.

Biren Technology
(Image credit: Biren Technology)

Biren, a Chinese developer of compute GPUs, is mulling an initial public offering (IPO) in Hong Kong this year. This comes as domestic clients are increasingly favoring its AI chips over those from Nvidia, which are expensive and in short supply, according to a report from Bloomberg. Hoping to seize on this opportunity, the tech startup is positioning itself to capitalize on the increased demand for its products 

Biren is expected to apply for its maiden share sale in the next few week, according to the report that cites anonymous sources. Concurrently, Biren is negotiating with potential investors, including government-supported funds in Guangzhou. These discussions are focused on another independent round of funding that could garner about 2 billion yuan ($279 million). Biren was seeking to raise funds last year at a valuation of 17 billion yuan, which is approximately $2.4 billion. For now, Biren has yet to determine the scope of the IPO, along with exact timeframe. 

The reason why Biren is so confident of its valuation is that the company's products look competitive compared to compute GPUs from Nvidia (at least on paper) and the market of AI-capable compute GPUs is booming these days.

Biren's debut family of compute GPUs consists of two options: the BR100 and the BR104. The 'baseline' BR104 delivers performance up to 128 FP32 TFLOPS or 1 INT8 PetaFLOPS, whereas the higher-end BR100 — which is essentially two BR104s on one silicon interposer — offers performance up to 256 FP32 TFLOPS or 2 INT8 PetaFLOPS. The mid-tier BR104 comes with 32GB of HBM2E memory, using a 2048-bit interface that provides bandwidth of 819 GB/s. By contrast, the premium BR100 is equipped with 64GB of HBM2E memory, featuring a 4096-bit interface with bandwidth of 1.64 TB/s.

Swipe to scroll horizontally
Header Cell - Column 0 Biren BR104Biren BR100Nvidia A100Nvidia H100
Form-FactorFHFL CardOAM ModuleSXM4SXM5
Transistor Count?77 billion54.2 billion80 billion
NodeN7N7N74N
Power300W550W400W700W
FP32 TFLOPS12825619.560
TF32+ TFLOPS256512??
TF32 TFLOPS??156/312*500/1000*
FP16 TFLOPS??78120
FP16 TFLOPS Tensor??312/624*1000/2000*
BF16 TFLOPS512102439120
BF16 TFLOPS Tensor??312/624*1000/2000*
INT810242048??
INT8 TFLOPS Tensor??624/1248*2000/4000*

There is another reason for the Biren's optimism. Its fundraising efforts coincide with the Chinese government's vigorous push to advance its domestic semiconductor industry. This move is a response to a U.S.-led campaign that blocked Chinese companies from acquiring numerous compute GPUs from AMD, Intel, and Nvidia, all of which compete against Biren's products. Since Nvidia's products are expensive and in short supply, according to media reports, Biren can sell more of its GPUs, at least to companies that do not use Nvidia's CUDA software stack for their AI workloads.

But Biren is facing numerous challenges too. Last year, TSMC temporarily halted shipments of compute GPUs to Biren in a bid to make sure that they meet U.S. export rules in terms of performance and capabilities. This forced the company to slash its headcount to cut costs. Apparently, Biren can procure enough silicon for now, so its main job at the moment is to ensure that its software stack is competitive when compared to those of Nvidia, Intel, and AMD. 

In this field, Nvidia is extremely hard to beat. The company has spent nearly two decades refining CUDA and in recent years invested hundreds of millions in making CUDA platform of choice for AI development. For now, numerous Chinese hyperscalers prefer to use Nvidia's GPUs for their AI products due to the superiority of CUDA and the amount of money they have already invested in this ecosystem.

See more GPUs News
Anton Shilov
Anton Shilov
Contributing Writer

Anton Shilov is a contributing writer at Tom’s Hardware. Over the past couple of decades, he has covered everything from CPUs and GPUs to supercomputers and from modern process technologies and latest fab tools to high-tech industry trends.

8 Comments Comment from the forums
  • gg83
    Does anyone know how the stock exchange in Hong Kong works? Can any international citizen invest? Did the ccp run out of money and Biren is hitting up anyone that will listen?
    Reply
  • JamesJones44
    Well yeah! If a cosmetics company can go public with the promise of AI and have the stock be 3x over subscribed image what you could get as a hardware company promising AI training!!!
    Reply
  • JamesJones44
    gg83 said:
    Does anyone know how the stock exchange in Hong Kong works? Can any international citizen invest? Did the ccp run out of money and Biren is hitting up anyone that will listen?
    non citizen's can invest in socks in Hong Kong, but there are a lot of things you must be aware of.

    1. Rules are very different than in the US/Europe
    2. Taxes on profit will happen in both countries (thought you can typically write of the other countries taxes on the other countries taxes)
    3. Depending on the broker, you may have to convert to the local currency.
    4. Foreign accounts are regulated heavily in the US. One should familiarize themselves with the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act. Failing to follow the rules comes with some fairly steep penalties.
    5. I've never heard of the PRoC robbing peoples accounts, but anything is possible and there is not a lot your home country is likely willing to do about it.

    IMO, I would look for a US based index fund to try to capture this momentum to avoid a lot of the overhead that comes with investing in foreign markets, but everyone has different tolerances for these things so it's just a friendly opinion.
    Reply
  • digitalgriffin
    JamesJones44 said:
    non citizen's can invest in socks in Hong Kong, but there are a lot of things you must be aware of.

    1. Rules are very different than in the US/Europe
    2. Taxes on profit will happen in both countries (thought you can typically write of the other countries taxes on the other countries taxes)
    3. Depending on the broker, you may have to convert to the local currency.
    4. Foreign accounts are regulated heavily in the US. One should familiarize themselves with the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act. Failing to follow the rules comes with some fairly steep penalties.
    5. I've never heard of the PRoC robbing peoples accounts, but anything is possible and there is not a lot your home country is likely willing to do about it.

    IMO, I would look for a US based index fund to try to capture this momentum to avoid a lot of the overhead that comes with investing in foreign markets, but everyone has different tolerances for these things so it's just a friendly opinion.
    Yes it is a nightmare. And there are rules in how much and what you are allowed to own.
    Reply
  • bit_user
    My hot take on their BR104 is that it's massively bandwidth-starved. If you merely look at the compute numbers, the BR100 seems comparable to the H100, but it's running on less than half the memory capacity and bandwidth.

    A big unknown, and what might prove to be an even bigger weakness, is the amount of on-die SRAM they have. This is crucial for getting good AI throughput, yet I have to wonder if they went too heavy on compute and too light on SRAM. Otherwise, I don't really see how they managed to squeeze so much compute on a N7 die.

    gg83 said:
    Does anyone know how the stock exchange in Hong Kong works? Can any international citizen invest?
    Well, that's historically been its strength. It would also probably explain why they're listing on the Hang Seng, instead of in Shanghai.

    My investing advice is historically quite bad. However, I personally wouldn't invest in them, even if they were listed on the Nasdaq. If you do, you ought to first do all the homework you can and read up on others' experiences investing in Chinese companies listed in Hong Kong.
    Reply
  • gg83
    JamesJones44 said:
    non citizen's can invest in socks in Hong Kong, but there are a lot of things you must be aware of.

    1. Rules are very different than in the US/Europe
    2. Taxes on profit will happen in both countries (thought you can typically write of the other countries taxes on the other countries taxes)
    3. Depending on the broker, you may have to convert to the local currency.
    4. Foreign accounts are regulated heavily in the US. One should familiarize themselves with the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act. Failing to follow the rules comes with some fairly steep penalties.
    5. I've never heard of the PRoC robbing peoples accounts, but anything is possible and there is not a lot your home country is likely willing to do about it.

    IMO, I would look for a US based index fund to try to capture this momentum to avoid a lot of the overhead that comes with investing in foreign markets, but everyone has different tolerances for these things so it's just a friendly opinion.
    Thank you for the fantastic response! I didn't know any of that. The US indexes seem interesting. I'll look into that. I just recently got a good job so I'm more curious about investing .
    Reply
  • bit_user
    gg83 said:
    Thank you for the fantastic response! I didn't know any of that. The US indexes seem interesting. I'll look into that. I just recently got a good job so I'm more curious about investing .
    More of my famously-bad investing advice:
    Don't put too much of your money into individual stocks. I've lost more money than I've made from buying individual stocks.
    Beware of short-selling. Don't dabble in it, until you fully understand it and what can go wrong. There's no limit to how much you can lose.
    The bulk of your investments should be blended and spread across less risky instruments.
    Periodically re-balance your portfolio (every 6 months or 1 year, typically), so you're not too heavy into one particular asset class.
    Beware of "green" investments, as some financial instruments claiming to be "green" really aren't as green as they're marketed, even being funneled into fossil fuel projects that qualify by simply reducing carbon overheads.
    Reply
  • JamesJones44
    bit_user said:
    More of my famously-bad investing advice:
    Don't put too much of your money into individual stocks. I've lost more money than I've made from buying individual stocks.
    Beware of short-selling. Don't dabble in it, until you fully understand it and what can go wrong. There's no limit to how much you can lose.
    The bulk of your investments should be blended and spread across less risky instruments.
    Periodically re-balance your portfolio (every 6 months or 1 year, typically), so you're not too heavy into one particular asset class.
    Beware of "green" investments, as some financial instruments claiming to be "green" really aren't as green as they're marketed, even being funneled into fossil fuel projects that qualify by simply reducing carbon overheads.
    Expanding on this. One of the best things I can recommend is learning how to use options, but don't get crazy with them. One of my favorite trading tips is recommending to look into how to sell what is called an "covered call". It can be a great way to earn extra money on a long term holding. The key is to do them in shorter time frames (3 to 6 months) at a price that you would be willing to sell the stock/index at, if the stock or index were to hit that price in the time frame.
    Reply