China chip start-up shows key gap in Biden export curbs: Report

One of China’s most promising chip designers has already navigated through the Biden administration’s export restrictions and concluded it will be able to continue tapping Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing to produce its advanced silicon.
 

Biren Technology develops artificial intelligence chips and is considered a promising domestic contender to compete with graphics chips from Nvidia, which has said it can no longer sell its most advanced AI products into China. The US measures were designed to limit China’s development of technology that may be used in aid of its military, and appeared to rule out access to advanced fabrication, but Biren believes its AI chips produced by TSMC are not covered by the sanctions, according to people with direct knowledge of the matter.
 

Shanghai-based Biren, founded in 2019, made bold claims in the summer about its chips outperforming Nvidia’s market-leading A100 AI accelerator -- the very product that can no longer be sold in China. But after reviewing the designs, TSMC and Biren concluded that the specs of the Chinese chip don’t meet the criteria for restriction, according to one of the people, who asked not to be named discussing a sensitive matter. That suggests Washington’s controls may not capture all alternatives to Nvidia’s hardware.
 

“Biren has a chip fortunately just below the threshold and the chip hence can still be made by TSMC,” Bernstein analysts led by Mark Li wrote in a report that analyzed chips against the export control.
 

TSMC, the world’s largest contract chipmaker, complies with all relevant rules and regulations and “will continue to serve all customers around the world,” Chief Executive Officer C.C. Wei said in response to a question about China during its earnings call last week.
 

Biren believes everything it’s doing is in compliance with legal regulations, according to one of the people. TSMC is reviewing products from other Chinese chip developers to see whether it can continue their production under the new export controls, another person said.
 

Representatives for Biren and TSMC declined to comment.
 

As the US banned exports of Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices Inc.’s high-end AI-training chips to China, it set a performance threshold above which no semiconductors made with US technology can be sold in the country. The metrics include a combination of connectivity speeds and operations per second. Bernstein’s analysis shows the Biren BR100 falls just shy of that cutoff.
 

Bernstein’s Li saw limited revenue exposure for TSMC from the new controls, stressing that “only very high-end compute chips are restricted” and estimating a hit of 0.4 per cent to the Taiwanese company’s 2023 sales.
 

Still, while Biren may continue building its current generation of semiconductors, Washington’s curbs are likely to effectively cap its progress up the technology ladder.