<a href="https://www.example.com">Baidu's Kunlun chip division is sprinting towards a $50 billion valuation for its IPO, accused of tying up a Chip Purchase Agreement at 3 to 7 times subscription</a>

According to WatchDog Beating monitoring, Baidu's AI chip subsidiary Kunlun Chip plans to conduct its initial public offering (IPO) in Hong Kong with a target valuation of $50 billion. However, during the roadshow, the company has listed chip procurement commitments as a prerequisite for subscriptions. Multiple sources familiar with the matter revealed that during the allocation process, Kunlun Chip gives priority to buyers committed to chip purchases, requiring the value of the purchased chips to be 3 to 7 times the subscription amount.

The $50 billion valuation target represents nearly a 40% premium over its parent company Baidu's market cap. Currently, Baidu holds a 58% stake in Kunlun Chip. Previously, Kunlun Chip planned to raise up to $20 billion through its IPO but is facing pressure to build an external customer base in the highly competitive Chinese AI chip market.

Established in 2011, Kunlun Chip's products are compatible with NVIDIA's CUDA software system. Baidu has already started training its new version of the Wenxin large model on Kunlun Chip, partially replacing NVIDIA's GPUs. The current flagship chip is the P800 series for inference, while the M100 series is set to undergo large-scale inference this year, and the M300 series is planned for training and inference by 2027. Aside from its parent company, Tencent has also become a major external customer.

However, Kunlun Chip did not make it onto the first batch of China's May list of certified secure and reliable evaluation chips, while Huawei, MetaX, Moore Threads, and Alibaba's T-Head have all been selected. The lack of certification is primarily due to the foundry channel, as Kunlun Chip has mainly relied on Samsung Electronics for chip manufacturing. In a bid to secure procurement orders from the government and state-owned enterprises, Kunlun Chip is negotiating with SMIC International to shift some of its chip production to domestic foundries.