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Tech war: how a Harvard Law School graduate is helping China achieve its goal of cutting reliance on advanced US chips

  • Biren’s new 7-nanometre GPU, the BR100, claims a peak performance three times better than equivalent products on the market
  • Zhang is under pressure for Biren to deliver after the company raised a whopping US$655 million from major venture capital funds

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Biren Technology chairman Michael Zhang Wen graduated from Harvard Law School. Photo: Handout
Tracy Quin Shanghai

Michael Zhang Wen is not a tech geek, but the Wall Street veteran, Harvard Law School graduate, and licensed attorney in the state of New York is at the forefront of China’s efforts to reduce its reliance on US artificial intelligence (AI) chips.

Zhang is chairman of Biren Technology, a Shanghai-based start-up he founded in 2019 to focus on graphics processing units (GPU), a type of chip that is important for machine learning and big data applications. Up till now, China has relied on US-based Nvidia Corp for its supply of advanced GPUs.

However, Washington’s decision last month to restrict exports of Nvidia’s high-end A100 and H100 chips to China has cast a shadow over the country’s ability to continue developing technologies from AI to smart cars.

The US move has heightened the sense of urgency in China to find alternatives to Nvidia, as well as GPU chips from Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), which are also covered by the export restrictions.

Coincidentally, in August Biren released a new 7-nanometre GPU called BR100, with a claimed peak performance three times better than equivalent products on the market, leading some to speculate that the three-year-old start-up had a chance to become China’s Nvidia.
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