Moore Threads secures $215 million for GPU development

Chinese GPU developer Moore Threads has secured $215.4 million in funding to continue working on GPU research and development. The fundraising signals investors’ general confidence in the rise of Chinese GPU development fueled by the country’s need for AI/ML accelerators and gaming GPUs.

Since its inception in late 2020, Moore Threads has released two GPUs (Chunxiao and Sudi) compatible with the company’s MUSA computing platform, as well as several add-in boards built on top of this design. The two GPUs are suitable for a wide range of markets, including gaming, cloud computing, artificial intelligence/machine learning, FP32 high-performance computing, and virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI). Pursuing so many market opportunities allows Moore Threads to attract investors from diverse backgrounds.

Funding rounds at Moore Threads in millions

Following the investment fund from China Mobile and Hexe Health Insurance, China Mobile can now benefit from the AI/ML, gaming, and cloud computing capabilities of the Moore Threads GPU, while Hexe Health Insurance is likely primarily interested in accelerating the AI ​​workload.

Meanwhile, the company received seed funding and a Series A round of funding from ByteDance, mega-corporation Tencent, Shenzhen Capital Group, Sequoia China, and GGV Capital. The Series A round raised the company approximately $313 million.

Moore Thread’s Chunxiao is a fairly complex GPU with 22 billion transistors and 4,096 stream processors, 128 tensor cores, 256 texture units and 256 render outputs clocked at 1.80 GHz. The unit supports FP32, FP16 and INT8 precision for various workloads and features a video engine supporting AV1, H.264 and H.265 codecs for up to 8K video and up to 32 streams with a resolution of 1080p30 can decode.

In the meantime, the MTT S80 16GB graphics card has yet to prove its full potential in the video games in Europe and the USA because it currently cannot beat even Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 3060 despite its higher complexity and processing power due to imperfect drivers.

Chunxiao fulfills almost every wish

Despite this, the MTT S80 and MTT S3000 can be used to play games popular in China, as well as remote Android game rendering, various artificial intelligence, VDI, machine learning, light high-performance computing, and video streaming workloads. Moore Threads’ Chunxiao GPU essentially ticks all the boxes for a Chinese GPU developer – meeting Chinese gaming, video streaming, cloud computing, and AI/ML needs.

Moore Threads has proven that it can build quite complex and powerful GPUs. The biggest challenge for the company now is ensuring that these GPUs can handle all the workloads they are intended for, which means developing drivers and the rest of the software stack. Nvidia has been honing its drivers for years to serve markets Moore Threads wants to target.

Whether Moore Threads will be able to do the same in less time only time will tell. But at least investors seem confident that the company will soon be able to at least partially replace Nvidia in China.

Header: Moore Threads