It's competitive vs ampere based a100, but the article did state this:
BR100 vs A100
In comparison to last-gen’s Ampere based A100, the BR100 is around 2.6x faster in select benchmarks. This puts to show how quick China is accelerating in the GPU department. However, sorry for being a killjoy but the Hopper based H100 is around 2-3x faster in the same benchmarks. Those Tensor cores can boost this lead to around 30x in various tests.
Hopper based GH100 chips were launched in the h100 GPUs back in march of this year, the biren chip winning the 'highest awards during this year's World Artificial Intelligence Conference' is odd when the benchmarking was made against last gen Nvidia ampere chips.
BR100 is also based on 'TSMC’s 2.5D CoWoS 7nm design'. Given the likely AI applications for these chips, US export bans on TSMC supplying these chips to Birentech and other chinese semi-con manufacturers is only a matter of time.