Editing by Xin Lanhua

China’s high-end GPU chip startup Biren Technology (壁仞科技) announced on February 21 that Yang Chaoyuan, the former general manager of Nvidia Shanghai, joined the company as the vice president and special assistant to the chairman.

Yang will be responsible for the resource integration and technological innovation, and the strategic layout of GPU/CPU/DPU’s back-end supply chain, creating more efficient, autonomous, and reliable supply and delivery capabilities.

Yang graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, majoring in electronic engineering. He has over 35 years of product R&D and team management experience in the GPU chip industry. 

Yang worked for NVIDA in the U.S. before, responsible for architecture design, tape-out, and team management. Later he became  NVIDIA Shanghai’s general manager, establishing the company’s first overseas R&D center.

He also had management experience with TSMC on cutting-edge product design.

Founded in 2019 by Zhang Wen, the former president of SenseTime, Biren Technology is committed to developing an original general-purpose computing system, establishing an efficient software and hardware platform, and providing integrated solutions in the intelligent computing field.

Its core team members have a technical background in hardware, software, and chip system. More than 85% of them have a master’s degree or above, and most of them are “veterans” in the industry, according to a Chinese news media report.

The company had obtained multiple rounds of financing, with a total amount of almost RMB5 billion ($789.5 million). And it has set up cooperation ties with China’s top universities.

Biren said its first high-end general-purpose GPU chip product has been taped out and will be officially put to the market for applications in smart cities, data centers, big data analysis, autonomous driving, healthcare, life sciences, and cloud games.