Moore Threads, a China-based GPU developer, has raised approximately $215.4 million in Series B funding to fund its ongoing research and development of multifunctional GPUs, DigiTimes reports.
The fundraising signals investor confidence in China's surge in GPU development in general, fueled by the country's need for AI/ML accelerators as well as GPUs for gaming.
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 several add-on boards (AIBs) built around that core design.
Both multi-function GPUs are designed for many 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.
In its Series B funding round, Moore Threads secured $215.4 million from an investment fund from China Mobile and Hexi Health Insurance.
China Mobile can leverage the AI/ML, gaming, and cloud computing capabilities of Moore Threads GPU, while Hexi Health Insurance is likely primarily interested in accelerating its AI workloads.
Meanwhile, the company has received seed funding and Series A funding rounds from ByteDance (owner of Tik Tok), Tencent, Shenzhen Capital Group (SCGC), Sequoia China, and GGV Capital.The Series A funding round netted the company approximately $313 million.
Moore Threads' latest Chunxiao is a rather complex 22 billion transistor GPU featuring 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 video and can decode up to 32 streams at 1080p30 resolution.
Meanwhile, the Chunxiao-based MTT S80 16GB graphics card has yet to demonstrate its full potential in popular video games in Europe and the United States, as it currently fails to beat even Nvidia's GeForce RTX 3060 despite its complexity and its higher computing performance (14.4 FP32 TFLOPS versus 12.7 FP32 TFLOPS) due to imperfect drivers.
Still, the MTT S80 along with its datacenter-oriented sibling MTT S3000 can be used to play popular games in China as well as remote Android game rendering, VDI, various artificial intelligences, machine learning, high-performance computing lightweight (HPC) that only requires FP32 precision and video streaming workloads. Essentially, Moore Threads' Chunxiao GPU meets all of the main goals of a Chinese GPU developer: serving China's AI/ML, gaming, cloud computing, and video streaming needs.
Moore Threads has proven that it can build fairly complex and capable GPUs, but now the company's main challenge is to ensure that these GPUs can handle all the workloads they are intended for, which means developing drivers and the rest of the software stack.
Market leader Nvidia has spent years tweaking its drivers to address the markets Moore Threads wants to address.
Whether Moore Threads will be able to do the same thing in a shorter amount of time is something only time will tell.But at least investors seem confident that over time the company will be able to at least partially replace Nvidia in China.