Canaan goes public: Mining machines are a thing of the past, AI and blockchain are the future

On November 21, Canaan Chairman and CEO Zhang Nangeng smiled and rang the Nasdaq opening bell. This announced that Canaan officially completed its listing in the United States, achieved the title of "the world's first blockchain stock", and captured its own highlight moment in the long river of business history.

Good winds help good things.

Ray Kurzweil, an American inventor and futurist, believes that “because the technological explosion will not come to an abrupt end, the improvement of basic disciplines and the growth of the application market will maintain a multiplier effect, and the progress made in the 21st century may eventually reach a thousand times that of the 20th century.”

Whether this prophecy will really come true remains to be tested by time, but it is an indisputable fact that driven by technological progress, the boundary between the real world and the information world is becoming increasingly blurred, and human society as a whole has ushered in a series of disruptive changes.

AI is the key driving force behind this series of changes.

Last September, Canaan launched the AI ​​chip K210, becoming the world's first company to master the independent intellectual property rights of commercial edge AI chips based on the RISC-V architecture, and thus created the history of the first successful listing of a Chinese AI chip company with independent intellectual property rights in the United States. The K210, with its outstanding performance, is also considered by international data consulting agency Frost & Sullivan to be a milestone in the development of hardware in the field of artificial intelligence edge computing.

Behind this is the fact that compared to its more familiar identity as a Bitcoin mining machine manufacturer, Canaan actually has a more outstanding performance in the field of AI chips, which is the underlying technology support for blockchain.

This is reflected in Canaan's leading position in the application of AI chips and ASIC technologies.

Since June 2015, Canaan has completed the design and development of seven 28nm, 16nm and 7nm ASIC chips in four years, with a 100% tape-out success rate.

In the past two and a half years ending at the end of June this year, Canaan has produced more than 130 million ASICs. In the following three months, production efficiency increased by 15%, and the total ASIC chip output exceeded 150 million.

While Canaan has mastered the entire IC design process, it has also become the first domestic company to put IC design on the cloud. Based on this, it has achieved multi-dimensional technological innovation and performance optimization, including algorithm development and optimization. The ASIC chips it develops and produces have more advantages such as low voltage, high energy efficiency and high computing density.

On the other hand, Canaan's self-developed series of AI chips have already been put into practical use.

American software technology expert Ed Burnett once said a humorous truth: "There are 31 satellites orbiting the earth in the sky, for no other reason than to tell you how to get to the convenience store."

There is a consensus in the industry that artificial intelligence cannot be just a concept that is talked about or a technology that only exists in the laboratory. It can only be called true artificial intelligence when it continuously promotes technological development and innovation while combining it with product implementation and benefiting the general public.

Taking Canaan's independently developed and produced K210 as an example, this chip has supplied more than 53,000 chips and development kits to the outside world in the past six months, and is widely used in multiple scenarios such as smart buildings, smart homes, smart energy consumption, smart agriculture and forestry, etc.

For example, the contactless access control system deployed by Canaan for the headquarters building of Neusoft based on the Kanzhi K210 has a built-in facial recognition algorithm with an accuracy rate of up to 99.96%. It supports users to complete identity authentication in a natural state - without having to point their face at the camera. It can also provide facial anti-counterfeiting through monocular liveness detection, which is sufficient to meet the monitoring needs in most security scenarios.

Through cooperation with Baidu and Beijing Forestry University, the visual and audio perception capabilities of the K210 chip have been more fully utilized. It can be applied to forestry and farmland monitoring to determine whether there are pests in the plants and their locations, effectively improving the intelligent pest prevention capabilities of agriculture and forestry.

In addition, Kanzhi K210 can also serve as the core of the AI ​​SaaS platform, providing end customers with overall artificial intelligence services that integrate hardware, algorithms and software, creating a complete and open ecosystem.

From this glimpse, it is not difficult to imagine the broad prospects of Canaan's AI chip technology and mass production of ASIC chips.

"There is no shortcut to accumulating teams and technologies in the chip industry. It is just iterating generation after generation and stacking up wafers one by one." Zhang Nangeng expressed Canaan's exploration and development over the past six years in this way.

Canaan's current achievements are closely related to the technical background of its founding team. As early as 2011, Zhang Nangeng made the first ASIC-based computing device at school.

Since 2013, Canaan has been tracing back to the source of technology research and development from the production of mining machines. Based on the financial conditions and technical foundation provided by the mining machine business, Canaan has persisted in the research and development of AI chips. After 6 years of hard work, it has achieved today's rich rewards. Currently, Canaan's team of scientific researchers accounts for 46% of the total number of employees, and nearly half of the technical personnel are AI talents, and 69 related patents have been obtained.

By establishing good cooperative relationships with global leading suppliers such as TSMC, ASE, STATS ChipPac, and SPIL, Canaan ensures stable output of chips with guaranteed quality and quantity. Through cooperation with technology giants such as Baidu, Canaan further consolidates the ability of chips to be applied in multiple scenarios.

In fact, the development of my country's two emerging technology industries, AI and blockchain, has encountered setbacks.

The former is mainly reflected in the fact that many technology companies have many deficiencies in their layout of AI chips, especially cloud-based AI chips. The latter has suffered more from unprovoked disasters. The wave of air coin ICOs that broke out in 2017 once swept the entire market, seriously undermined the industry atmosphere, and also hurt the true value of blockchain technology.

However, as pointed out at the national policy level, the integrated application of blockchain technology plays an important role in new technological innovation and industrial transformation. Cutting-edge technology fields including AI, 5G, industrial Internet, and Internet of Things are like new infrastructure.

This means that it is an inevitable trend for the development of my country's blockchain and AI industries to further accelerate.

Canaan is currently developing the second-generation 28nm AI chip. Compared with the previous generation, the new chip is developed for 5G scenarios and has greatly improved computing power and energy efficiency. It will be used to explore new scenarios such as smart retail and smart driving. In addition, the development plan for the third-generation 12nm AI chip suitable for the broader cloud computing field has also been put on the agenda.

This undoubtedly demonstrates the potential contained in cutting-edge technology that does not take unorthodox paths, leads blockchain from virtual to real, and points out a development direction for the entire blockchain industry.

More importantly, driven by the "blockchain + AI" dual engines, Canaan can also actively promote the integrated innovation of blockchain and AI.

For example, the advancement of AI technology requires massive amounts of data. The blockchain's distributed storage of global data that is shareable and traceable can help AI train in a model-parallel or data-parallel manner, improve machine learning efficiency, and promote the development of AI.

On the other hand, blockchain technology currently still has pain points such as huge energy consumption expenses and low data recording rates. Through the access of AI technology, whether it is using more efficient artificial intelligence for mining to improve energy utilization, or using AI algorithms to optimize the blockchain technology structure and improve energy efficiency, it is a manifestation of AI empowering blockchain.

This is also where Canaan’s future imagination space lies.

Today, China holds 9 seats among the world's 20 technology companies with the highest market capitalization, an achievement that would have been unimaginable even 10 years ago. It also means that China, as a single market, has already provided commercial value comparable to that of the global market.

This is actually the transition from the Internet era to the mobile Internet era, and then to the subsequent AI era. A number of emerging industry players in China are striving to seize the new opportunities brought about by the emergence of cutting-edge technologies.

In the two blue ocean markets of AI chips and blockchain, Canaan’s competitors should be itself.

As Zhang Nangeng said in his speech at the listing, "Today we stand here together to feel this glorious moment, but the listing is not the ultimate goal, but our new beginning. In the next second, we will continue to devote ourselves to the new battlefield and continue to expand our business."

Canaan, which is committed to becoming a super computing solution provider in the next decade, still has a long but exciting road to go.