The brothers behind Cambricon, the chip start-up powering China’s AI ambitions
- Cambricon Technologies is worth US$2.5 billion, making it one of China’s most valuable AI chip start-ups
- Founded by brothers Chen Yunji and Chen Tianshi, its chips have been used to power nearly 100 million smartphones and servers
What few know is that to achieve the decisive victory, the AlphaGo programme had to be powered by nearly 2,000 central processing units (CPUs) and 300 graphics processing units (GPUs). The electricity bills were as high as US$3,000 a game at the time, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) professor Han Song said in a recent speech at Tsinghua University.
The same month as AlphaGo’s victory over South Korean master Lee, two Chinese brothers working in a research lab at the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) started their own company in Beijing. Their mission: to develop computer chips tailored for AI applications, allowing smaller and more power-efficient machines, at a lower price.
Raised in East China’s Jiangxi province by an educator mother and electric engineer father, Chen Yunji, 36, and Chen Tianshi, 34, have similar backgrounds. Both entered college at an early age, when they were 14 and 16 years old respectively, and obtained their doctorate degrees in computer science by the time they were 24 before joining CAS’ computing technology institute as assistant researchers, according to a profile by elecfans.com, an electronic industry portal.
Cambricon declined an interview for this story.
While most consumers may not have heard of their company, the 3-year-old Cambricon Technologies’ AI chips are everywhere now – according to CAS they have been used to power nearly 100 million smartphones and servers so far including those by Huawei Technologies and Alibaba Group, which is the parent company of the South China Morning Post.
