China’s Biren raises $892M to build GPUs that can take on Nvidia at home

Nvidia can barely sell its best chips in China. A crop of local challengers is racing to fill the gap. One of them just raised nearly $900m to speed up.

Shanghai Biren Technology is selling HK$7 billion (about $892.5m) of new shares to boost GPU production. That is according to the South China Morning Post. It is a bet that China’s cloud and data-centre buyers will keep spending, and that Biren can supply them.

The terms

Biren will issue 153 million new shares at HK$46.2 each. That is a 9.9 per cent discount to Friday’s close. The company only went public in Hong Kong in January, and its stock has since surged nearly 150 per cent. Investors were more cautious this week. Shares rose in early trading, then closed 5.4 per cent lower on Monday.

Most of the money has a clear job. Biren said 60 per cent will fund the commercialisation and mass production of its next-generation general-purpose GPUs. Another 20 per cent goes to research, with the rest for investments and working capital. The raise is aggressive, but so is the burn. The company had already spent more than 70 per cent of its listing proceeds by the end of June.

Why now

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The timing is not an accident. Washington’s export controls keep Nvidia’s most advanced AI chips away from Chinese customers. That has opened a lucrative gap at home, and a scrum of domestic firms is rushing to fill it. Biren competes with Moore Threads, MetaX and Cambricon, all chasing the same buyers.

Demand, at least, is not the problem. “Customers such as cloud service providers, AI data centres and enterprise customers are substantially expanding their AI computing deployments,” Biren said in its filing. It framed the raise as a way to keep pace, arguing it needs “adequate capital to ramp up the production” of its next GPUs to fill orders on time.

A crowded race

The money is chasing a fast-moving field. MetaX, a fellow Shanghai Nvidia challenger, said in June it would seek a Hong Kong listing. That came months after its Shanghai STAR Market debut. Kunlunxin, the chip unit of Baidu, is reportedly chasing an even bigger number. It wants a valuation of at least 100 billion yuan, about $14.7bn, for its own Hong Kong float.

None of this makes Biren an Nvidia. Its chips remain a step behind the market leader, and China’s most powerful AI accelerators still tend to be custom designs from Huawei and others, not general-purpose GPUs.

But with foreign supply choked off, “good enough” and “made in China” is a real business. It is worth almost $900m of fresh capital. The gap Nvidia leaves behind is the whole opportunity.