A fabless device manufacturer vaunted as” China’s Nvidia” has announced it may reject more than 400 people after being hit with a shareholders’s fit in a charity debate.
In an inner conference on August 30th, Xiangdixian Computing Technology, a Chongqing-based chip designer, announced that it had to discontinue its work contracts due to a lack of funds.  ,
The unicorn company, valued at 15 billion yuan ( US$ 2.1 billion ), laid off dozens of its newly employed fresh graduates in April and started capping all employees ‘ monthly salaries at 20, 000 yuan in May. Over the past two decades, it has apparently failed to pay its people.  ,
On September 1 hour, Xiangdixian issued a , speech stating , that it has not yet gone penniless, as it is only “optimizing” its composition to increase productivity.  ,
Since its founding, the company has been concentrating on producing graphic processing units ( GPUs ), but China’s market development has not yet met the company’s expectations. The firm said it is looking for new owners.  ,
Some experts said Xiangdixian’s products could n’t compete with rivals like Huawei Technologies ‘ Ascend 910 series and Hygon Information’s Deep Computing Units (DCUs ), forcing the company to downsize its operations.  ,
They speculated that the Chinese authorities might not want to place too many Graphic types on local markets because it might prevent habitat development.  ,
” Hygon’s DCUs are now using language pieces for Nvidia’s CUDA program. However, it’s possible that Nvidia will eventually outlaw the use of other chips in its program, according to a Beijing-based journalist in an April article.  ,
Chinese chip makers should not take chances, even though Nvidia has only warned its users about the potential ban and has n’t yet taken any action. They may prepare for the worst by building their personal ecosystem”, the poet says.
The good news is that Alibaba and Baidu, two of the largest online retailers, have already agreed to add Hygon’s DCUs to the nation’s artificial intelligence ( AI ) infrastructure ecosystem.
Since 2021, Nvidia has prohibited running CUDA-based software on other hardware platforms using translation layers in its end-user license agreement ( EULA ), according to a report from Tom’s Hardware in March. The alert does not in fact prevent CUDA application from running on platforms other than Nvidia hardware.  ,  ,
A Huafu Securities research report published in May this year claimed that the effectiveness of Hygon’s Shensuan No 1, launched in 2021, is equivalent to 40 % of Nvidia’s A100 while Shensuan No 2, launched last month, reaches 80 % of the A100. The coming Shensuan No 3 would be the A100’s equal, according to the article.  ,
Shareholder revolt ,
Tang Zhimin, the president and founder of Xiangdixian, reportedly told employees on August 30 that the company had previously agreed to a pricing adjustment process so that it could raise more than 500 million renminbi in line B funding.
But, he said the business failed to meet the requirement and is now being sued by owners. He also reportedly said the agency’s bank account has been frozen.
The Time Weekly, a regular newspaper based in Guangzhou, visited Xiangdixian’s offices in Chongqing on Monday but its writer said nobody was there.  ,
A complaint involving four Xiangdixian owners was filed on August 23 in Wuxi, Jiangsu state, according to the news.  ,
Three of the four are under Tang’s control, while the other is the state-owned Jiangsu Zhongde Services Trade Industry Investment Fund, a joint venture between China Merchants Group and the Wuxi authorities.  ,
Separately, Capitalonline Date Service, a Shenzhen-listed cloud service provider, said in its 2024 time report that it filed a complaint against Xiangdixian at the Beijing Arbitration Commission regarding an excellent payment of 18.8 million yuan.  ,
The firm said a local prosecutor in Yubei area, Chongqing had now frozen XiangDixian’s goods worth 8 million yuan on August 1.  ,
Tang , received , his PhD degree from the Institute of Computing Technology ( ICT), Chinese Academy of Sciences ( CAS ), in 1990. He has since then worked in the ICT as a scientist before moving to Apacewave Technologies Limited as general manager.  ,
In 2011, he returned to ICT as a scientist. Before founding Xiangdixian in 2020, he served as the chief technology officer at Sugon ( actually Dawning Information Industry Co Ltd) from 2012 to 2015 and the general manager at Hygon Information Technology from 2016 to 2019.  ,
Tang is now the , dean , of the University of Computility Microelectronics at Shenzhen University of Advanced Technology. Although Tang has expertise in managing state-owned device manufacturers, Xiangdixian has not been rescued by state-owned resources or businesses.  ,
Some experts speculated that this may be because Xiangdixian produced its GPUs using international intellectual property. They said if one time the West restrictions Xiangdixian, its operations may be severely disrupted.  ,
TMTpost.com, a Taiwanese IT site, said 80 % of Chinese GPU manufacturers, including Xiangdixian, are using the intellectual property of Imagination Technologies, a Chinese-owned company based in the United Kingdom.
Xiangdixian has launched two GPUs, Tianjun No 1 and No 2, but they have never entered large production.  ,  ,
Due to the export control plan in place here in the UK and the China Entity List, which have had an affect on us and our earnings, Imagination CEO Simon Beresford-Wylie told Electronic Engineering Times in an exclusive meeting on August 23.” The China industry has been a bit more challenging than we’d have thought.  ,
Read: China racing to hoard AI-powering HBM bits
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