(Yicai) June 12 -- The co-founder and former president of Biren Technology has set up a new artificial intelligence company specializing in data centers, less than a year after the Chinese semiconductor startup was added to a US blacklist due to alleged national security concerns, Yicai learned from a person familiar with the matter.

Xu Lingjie is the general manager, executive director and legal representative of Myriad Intelligence, which was set up earlier this month with a registered capital of USD10 million, according to corporate information platform Tianyancha.

The Shanghai-based company will focus on data centers such as server clusters and computing power optimization, the person said. It is early days still for the firm and more details will be disclosed to the public in due course.

Xu left Biren in January this year, three months after the Shanghai-based company was included in the so-called Entity List by the US Department of Commerce, preventing US firms from selling it their software and hardware.

Xu co-founded Biren in 2019 and, as president, was responsible for product planning and market development. During his time at the helm, Biren launched its first graphics processing unit chip, the BR100, in August 2022 which boasted a peak hash rate faster than US chip giant Nvidia’s products at the time. This was followed by a series of GPUs that could be used for AI training.

Xu's new company has also enlisted the services of Jin Chen, who was vice president and head of China engineering at UK chip developer Graphcore, according to Tianyancha. Market rumors claim that Jin will serve as chief technology officer at Myriad Intelligence.

Before setting up Biren, Xu served as director of the cloud intelligence business group at e-commerce giant Alibaba Group Holding. He previously worked on GPU chip research and development at the US’ Nvidia and AMD as well as South Korea’s Samsung Electronics.

Editors: Dou Shicong, Kim Taylor