section_path: History/Founding and early years (2016–2023)
section_name: Founding and early years (2016–2023)
paragraph_text: Founding and early years (2016–2023)
  
  In February 2016, High-Flyer was co-founded by AI enthusiast Liang Wenfeng, who had been trading since the 2008 financial crisis while attending Zhejiang University. The company began stock trading using a GPU -dependent deep learning model on 21 October 2016; before then, it had used CPU -based linear models. By the end of 2017, most of its trading was driven by AI.
  
  Liang established High-Flyer as a hedge fund focused on developing and using AI trading algorithms, and by 2021 the firm was using AI exclusively, often using Nvidia chips.
  
  In 2019, the company began constructing its first computing cluster, Fire-Flyer, at a cost of 200 million yuan; it contained 1,100 GPUs interconnected at 200 Gbit/s and was retired after 1.5 years in operation.
  
  By 2021, Liang had started buying large quantities of Nvidia GPUs for an AI project, reportedly obtaining 10,000 Nvidia A100 GPUs before the United States restricted chip sales to China. Computing cluster Fire-Flyer 2 began construction in 2021 with a budget of 1 billion yuan.
  
  It was reported that in 2022, Fire-Flyer 2's capacity had been used at over 96%, totaling 56.74 million GPU hours. 27% was used to support scientific computing outside the company.
  
  During 2022, Fire-Flyer 2 had 5000 PCIe A100 GPUs in 625 nodes, each containing 8 GPUs. At the time, it exclusively used PCIe instead of the DGX version of A100, since at the time the models it trained could fit within a single 40 GB GPU VRAM and so there was no need for the higher bandwidth of DGX (i.e., it required only data parallelism but not model parallelism). Later, it incorporated NVLinks and NCCL (Nvidia Collective Communications Library) to train larger models that required model parallelism.
  
  On 14 April 2023, High-Flyer announced the launch of an artificial general intelligence (AGI) research lab, stating that the new lab would focus on developing AI tools unrelated to the firm's financial business. Two months later, on 17 July 2023, that lab was spun off into an independent company, DeepSeek, with High-Flyer as its principal investor and backer. Venture capital investors were reluctant to provide funding, as they considered it unlikely that the venture would be able to quickly generate an " exit ".