The US ban of Nvidia and AMD’s flagship artificial intelligence chips to China will create new opportunities for local companies. This was announced by industry experts, writes Reuters.

A group of independent experts measured the processing speed of AI tasks on the BR100 accelerator developed by Chinese startup Biren. Experts confirmed the company’s claim that the chip is superior to one of the processors that fell under the restrictions.

“The short benchmarks broadly reflect image processing and natural language processing, two very important AI workloads,” said David Kanter, founder of the MLCommons assessment team.

Founded by former employees of Alibaba and Nvidia, Biren has announced its intention to begin selling the BR100 chip to private data centers and cloud customers. The initiative noted that they do not plan to cooperate with the military.

Alongside Biren, companies such as Cambricon, Alibaba Group PingTouGe, Iluvatar CoreX, Denglin Technology, Moore Threads, Vastai Technologies and MetaX are actively developing alternatives to Nvidia solutions. These startups alone have raised more than $2.5 billion in recent years, according to analytics firm PitchBook.

Computer science professor Jack Dongarra said the US is already using a similar scenario. Previously, the US government had placed an embargo on shipments of Intel processors to some Chinese high-end system developers.

As a result, China created chips for its supercomputers.

But some analysts and US executives believe companies need more than a fast processor to gain AI market share. They need to create an accelerator software ecosystem that can compete with Nvidia’s CUDA platform, which dominates the AI ​​market.

“New Chinese firms will have to prove they are reliable, they can upgrade the hardware […]”And we offer an engaging software ecosystem,” said Paul Triolo, China senior vice president of strategy firm Albright Stonebridge Group.

Recall that the US government in September imposed licensing restrictions on the supply of Nvidia AI accelerator to China and Russia.