Chinese GPU unicorn Moore Threads inches closer to IPO: Report

Moore Threads, a Chinese GPU developer that is also focusing on AI, is progressing toward a potential IPO after restructuring as a joint-stock entity and increasing its capital base to ¥330 million ($45.6 million), reports the South China Morning Post. Despite being on the U.S. Entity List, the company has garnered substantial private and government funding to advance China’s AI and GPU capabilities. 

In preparation for a public listing, Moore Threads shifted from a limited-liability company to a joint-stock status in late October, raising its capital from $3.32 million to $45.6 million. This restructuring, often a step toward an IPO, signals a likely move to enter the public market, which would align strategy of Moore Threads with other domestic players like Biren Technology and Enflame, also preparing for listings. 

Moore Threads was founded in 2020 by Zhang Jianzhong, who previously led Nvidia’s China operations. So far, the company has introduced three generations of microarchitectures designed both for gaming and AI workloads. 

Moore Threads has benefited greatly from China’s push toward technological independence as it got plenty of money from state-linked investors. Since its inception, the company has raised $800 million from notable investors, including ByteDance, Tencent, and state-backed Beijing Zhongguancun Science City Innovation Development, highlighting strong support from both private and public sectors.  

The company has positioned itself as a top GPU and AI-accelerator developer in China and became pretty well known, yet officially its focus was on gaming (probably to fly below the U.S. government’s radar). Still, Moore Threads’s second-generation Chunxiao architecture supports FP16 and INT8 data formats that are not required for graphics processing in addition to FP32, which is used for graphics. The company’s 3rd Generation Quyuan GPU architecture already supports FP64, FP32, TF32, FP16, BF16, and INT8 data formats used for AI and HPC workloads and can scale to clusters containing up to 10,000 GPUs.  

As a result of the dual-use nature of Moore Threads GPUs, U.S. sanctions in October 2022 placed Moore Threads into the Entity List (along with Biren Technology, another China-based developer of compute GPUs), blocking it from using American technologies, including multinational foundries, such as TSMC, to produce chips.