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.
