Xiao Qiyang, born in Hong Kong, China, earned his Ph.D. from Stanford University at the age of 24, with the father of artificial intelligence, Marvin Minsky, even writing the preface for his book.
It wasn't until 2019 that Xiao Qiyang prepared to start his own business, aiming to conquer the DPU chip.
He believes that in cloud services, all the infrastructure tasks that CPUs handle poorly and GPUs cannot handle can be handed over to the DPU. The DPU can be considered the soul of the entire cloud data center.
Since the end of last year, CPU companies represented by Haiguang and Loongson, and GPU or AI computing power chip companies represented by Cambricon, Moore Threads, MetaX, and Biren, have all entered a harvest season in the secondary market.
The DPU company founded by Xiao Qiyang in Shenzhen—Yunbao Intelligence—has also entered the view of the capital markets. The filing for Yunbao Intelligence's IPO tutoring has been accepted by the Shenzhen Securities Regulatory Bureau, with CITIC Securities as the tutoring institution, marking its journey to become the "first domestic DPU stock."
This is the first industry unicorn in the domestic DPU sector, with a valuation of 14 billion yuan after its last round of financing.
In the same year the company was founded, NVIDIA founder Jensen Huang also publicly stated that the "DPU is the third major chip for data centers," leading to the DPU's rapid development and becoming a key focus for the entire industry.
With the acceleration of artificial intelligence and the construction of hyperscale intelligent computing centers, the importance of DPUs has become increasingly prominent. Currently, major chip manufacturers like NVIDIA, Intel, Broadcom, and Marvell have already laid out their strategies in the DPU arena.
Facing a competitive landscape where international tech giants dominate the global DPU market, domestic manufacturers have broad space for independent innovation. Companies like Yunbao Intelligence are charting another path by creating domestic DPUs with the "best cost-performance ratio."
TENCENT's Bet Makes It the Largest Shareholder Yunbao Intelligence's founder, Xiao Qiyang, was born in Hong Kong, China, and studied in the United States early on, earning a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University at the age of 24.
During his studies, his doctoral thesis solved a theoretical problem in the field of artificial intelligence that had remained unsolved for over 30 years, and the father of AI, Marvin Minsky, wrote the preface for his work.
After graduation, Xiao Qiyang first taught at UC Irvine, then served as an endowed chair associate professor at MIT, where he founded the Center for Automated Identification Research. His early research focused on AI neural networks, later shifting to high-performance processors and network chip-related research.
In 2002, Xiao Qiyang left academia and co-founded RMI Corporation in Silicon Valley. It is reported that during his time at RMI, Xiao and his team developed the world's highest-performance multi-core processor for the communications field from scratch. Its chips were widely used by several domestic and international communications network equipment manufacturers in routers, wireless base stations, controllers, core networks, security equipment, and smart network interface cards.
In 2009, RMI merged with NetLogic Microsystems. Two years later, Broadcom acquired NetLogic for $3.7 billion.
Five years later, Xiao Qiyang left Broadcom. A leading domestic cloud service provider was preparing to build smart network interface cards and recruited seven core members of Xiao Qiyang's team.
In terms of chip form, DPUs evolved from smart network interface cards. The single-chip SoC technical solution is considered the future mainstream for DPUs due to its advantages of high performance, low power consumption, and general programmability, but its technical barriers are also several times higher.
In 2019, with the rapid development of cloud computing, data centers, and artificial intelligence, coupled with changes in the international technology environment, Xiao Qiyang—already financially independent and possessing a deep understanding of smart NICs—prepared to start a business and tackle DPU chips.
Xiao Qiyang once said, "In cloud services, all the infrastructure tasks that CPUs handle poorly and GPUs cannot handle can be handed over to the DPU. The DPU can be considered the soul of the entire cloud data center."
In August 2020, Xiao Qiyang founded Yunbao Intelligence, a leading semiconductor company focused on cloud computing and data center data processor unit (DPU) chips and solutions. According to its website, Yunbao Intelligence's core team comes from Broadcom, Intel, ARM, Alibaba, etc., possessing a highly experienced DPU chip and software R&D team.
In the very same year Yunbao Intelligence was founded, the DPU sector received a major bet from a giant.
Jensen Huang stated in 2020 that the DPU would become one of the three pillars of future computing, and the standard configuration for future data centers would be CPU+DPU+GPU, with CPUs for general-purpose computing, GPUs for accelerated computing, and DPUs for data processing. Meanwhile, NVIDIA acquired the global smart NIC leader Mellanox for $6.9 billion, placing its bet on the DPU track.
As the DPU sector gained increasing attention, major internet companies and market investment institutions joined the fray. Shortly after its establishment, Yunbao Intelligence received seed-round funding backed by institutions including Yaotu Capital, Hongzhuo Capital, 5Y Capital, Zhen Fund, China IC Capital, and Hua Ye Tian Cheng.
Subsequently, Yunbao Intelligence continuously secured capital injections. By the Series D financing round at the end of November last year, Yunbao Intelligence's valuation had exceeded 14 billion yuan, with participants including Tongchuang Weiye, Oriental Fortune Capital, Cornerstone Capital, IDG Capital, and TENCENT.
In terms of equity structure, information from Qichacha shows that TENCENT, through multiple investments, holds a combined stake of 22.5351%, making it the company's largest shareholder. Founder Xiao Qiyang directly holds a 7.551% stake.
Building the "Best Cost-Performance" Domestic DPU Yunbao Intelligence has become the only unicorn enterprise in the domestic DPU chip field, continuously receiving capital injections, which is inseparable from the company's technology implementation and commercial applications.
Public information shows that in the global DPU technology competition, Yunbao Intelligence independently developed China's first high-performance, generally programmable DPU SoC, which currently reaches top industry standards. Compared to traditional solutions, Yunbao's DPU chip solution improves performance by 4 times, reduces power consumption by over 50%, achieves network bandwidth of 400 Gbps, RDMA of 200 Gbps, and significantly reduces costs.
The chip adopts an innovative hierarchical programmable design, integrates a data processing unit supporting the P4 language, a self-developed RISC-V microprocessor unit, and a high-performance server CPU processing unit, comprehensively covering users' diverse and business-customizable needs, significantly improving the computing efficiency of data centers.
Currently, this Yunbao chip has achieved mass production, is widely used by leading domestic cloud service providers and operators like TENCENT and China Mobile, and is applied across multiple industries.
Specifically, the Yunbao Yunsiao DPU chip is China's first DPU chip to reach 400Gbps, applied in scenarios like cloud computing and artificial intelligence, achieving triple functions of data center performance, energy efficiency, and security. Furthermore, the Yunbao Fengchi smart network interface card chip is a leading domestic 400Gbps smart NIC chip. This chip is a core component supporting the interconnection of tens of thousands of GPUs, greatly improving the effective computing utilization rate of clusters, and is a key infrastructure chip supporting the training of trillion-parameter models.
Xiao Qiyang stated that Yunbao Intelligence's goal is not merely to pursue singular "peak performance" but to create domestic DPUs with the "best cost-performance ratio." On one hand, this meets the objective of rapid commercial product deployment to capture the largest market share; on the other hand, it uses the most core chip architecture to support high-performance, high-throughput virtualization and applications across different cloud scenarios and AI, thereby improving operational efficiency and reducing hardware and operational maintenance costs.
Amid the current global wave of artificial intelligence, the DPU, as a new type of processor for data-centric computing, forms the three core components of modern computing alongside the CPU and GPU. It is mainly applied in areas such as security acceleration, storage acceleration, and network virtualization in data centers and is regarded as the "intelligent transportation and logistics hub" of the data center.
If a computing center is likened to a modern city, the CPU is the city's brain, responsible for global decision-making and diverse complex logic; the GPU is the professional muscle group, specializing in tasks like AI computing and graphics rendering; the DPU is the city's intelligent transportation and logistics hub, responsible for efficiently scheduling,分流 (shunting/distributing), and security screening all data flows, ensuring resource coordination.
Today, several world tech giants, including NVIDIA and Intel, and major domestic cloud service providers like Alibaba Cloud, TENCENT Cloud, Baidu Cloud, and Volcano Engine, almost all use DPUs in their respective data centers for all elastic scheduling of computing resources, dynamic on-demand allocation, etc., aiming to improve the efficiency of cloud service computing resources and reduce operational costs.
The surge in demand for computing power in data centers driven by AI has positioned the DPU as a key chip for accelerating data processing, ushering in a period of rapid expansion for the global DPU market. With international giants like NVIDIA, Broadcom, and Intel dominating the global DPU market, this intensely competitive landscape creates vast space for independent innovation by domestic manufacturers.
It is understood that Yunbao Intelligence plans to further expand its industrial chain in the future, establishing a strategic investment department to participate in investing in some upstream and downstream companies in the industrial chain, further extending the company's business development and creating synergies.
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