China’s Biren seeks US$900m to fund GPU push and challenge Nvidia amid AI boom

China’s Biren seeks US$900m to fund GPU push and challenge Nvidia amid AI boom The company says 60 per cent of the fresh capital will be for commercialisation and mass production of next generation general-purpose GPUs Chinese artificial intelligence chipmaking champion Shanghai Biren Technology is raising HK$7 billion (US$892.5 million) to boost production of its graphics processing units (GPUs), joining a fierce domestic battle to capture Nvidia’s market share in the country amid a global AI boom. “Customers such as cloud service providers, AI data centres and enterprise customers are substantially expanding their AI computing deployments,” the company said in the filing. “Facing robust customers’ demand, the company takes the view that it is essential to maintain adequate capital to ramp up the production of the company’s next-generation [general purpose] GPU solutions in order to ensure timely fulfilment of orders,” it added. Shares of Biren rose nearly 1 per cent before reverting to a 2.5 per cent drop on Monday morning. The stock has surged over 150 per cent since its initial public offering (IPO). The aggressive pace of fundraising comes as skyrocketing chip demand from China’s massive AI data centre buildout has sparked a race among local AI chip developers to scale up production.