Chinese AI chipmaker Biren reportedly plans $300m HK IPO

Biren Technology, a Shanghai-based AI chipmaker, plans to launch a Hong Kong IPO in the coming weeks, according to sources.

The listing could raise about US$300 million, with the company set to issue up to 372.5 million shares and convert 873.3 million onshore shares to Hong Kong-listed stock.

Lead banks include Bank of China International, CICC, and Ping An Securities.

Biren develops GPUs and is among Chinese firms building domestic alternatives to US-made chips amid export restrictions.

The company was valued at around US$2 billion before a mid-2025 funding round backed by the Guangdong and Shanghai governments.

Biren was added to the US Entity List in 2023, limiting its access to TSMC.

🔗 Source: Reuters

🧠 Food for thought

Implications, context, and why it matters.

Biren chip output stays unclear, raising IPO doubts

After the U.S. Entity List move (a trade blacklist), Biren lost access to TSMC’s advanced process tech 1. Public reports do not name the current foundry or node, and the BR100 used TSMC 7nm with 77 billion transistors 2.
Biren may redesign a follow‑on chip such as BR104 for SMIC’s 2nd‑generation 7nm‑class process 1. Whether a SMIC‑made application‑specific integrated circuit (ASIC) would be competitive is unclear. Capacity, process maturity and shipments remain unknown, so the planned Hong Kong IPO near US$300 million may fund roadmap work before scale‑up. The firm was valued near US$2 billion before a mid‑2025 round with Guangdong and Shanghai government funds, yet it has not shared revenue or shipment figures.

Cloud and AI startups in China face Biren porting risks

Biren’s BR100 lacks double‑precision floating point (FP64) support, and its launch deck omitted texture units, which are graphics blocks 3. Teams moving from NVIDIA must check if workloads suit a chip built for training and inference rather than general high‑performance computing (HPC).
BR100’s BLink is a high‑speed chip‑to‑chip link 3 that needs strong frameworks and drivers similar to NVIDIA’s NVLink, yet sources do not detail the maturity of Biren’s software development kit (SDK), driver stack, or integrations. With limited access to overseas high‑performance AI processors 1, Chinese cloud and AI app teams will wait for proof that Biren can deliver stable, high‑yield chips at volume.