Chinese GPU maker raises $250 million funding round to accelerate GPU product development.

Moore Threads, a China-based GPU developer, raised around $215.4 million in Series B funding to finance its continuous multi-functional GPU research and development, according to DigiTimes. The fund-raising signals investors' confidence in the rise of China GPU development fueled by the country's need for AI/ML accelerators as well as graphics processors for gaming. In this Series B round, Moore Threads secured $215.4 million from an investment fund of China Mobile and Hexe Health Insurance, with China Mobile positioned to take advantage of Moore Threads GPU's AI/ML, gaming, and cloud computing capabilities, whereas Hexe Health Insurance is primarily interested in the acceleration of its artificial intelligence workloads.

Since its inception in late 2020, Moore Threads has introduced two graphics processors compatible with the company's MUSA computing platform — Sudi and Chunxiao — and multiple add-in-boards (AIBs) built around that base design. Both multi-functional GPUs are designed for numerous markets, including gaming, cloud computing, artificial intelligence/machine learning, FP32 high-performance computing, and virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI). The company received earlier seed and Series A funding rounds from ByteDance (TikTok owner), Tencent, Shenzhen Capital Group (SCGC), Sequoia China, and GGV Capital, with the Series A funding round bringing the company around $313 million.

Moore Threads' latest Chunxiao GPU is a complex processor containing 22 billion transistors and packing 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 comes with a video engine that supports AV1, H.264, and H.265 codecs for up to 8K videos as well as can decode up to 32 streams at a 1080p30 resolution. The Chunxiao-based MTT S80 16GB graphics card currently fails to beat Nvidia's GeForce RTX 3060 in video games popular in Europe and the U.S. despite its higher complexity and compute performance (14.4 FP32 TFLOPS vs 12.7 FP32 TFLOPS), a shortfall attributed to imperfect drivers.

However, the MTT S80 and its datacenter-oriented MTT S3000 sibling can be used to play games popular in China as well as for remote Android game rendering, VDI, various artificial intelligence, machine learning, light high-performance computing that only requires FP32 precision, and video streaming workloads. Moore Threads' Chunxiao GPU meets the primary goals of a Chinese GPU developer — to address China's needs in AI/ML, gaming, cloud computing, and video streaming. The company's main challenge now is ensuring that these GPUs can address all the workloads they are intended for, which means developing drivers and the rest of the software stack, a task that market leader Nvidia has spent years perfecting.