Author | Liu Baodan

Editor | Huang Yu

In this wave of the AI industry, the seller Nvidia is undoubtedly the biggest winner in the capital market. Now, domestic GPU unicorns have also begun their marketing journey.

On November 13, the official website of the China Securities Regulatory Commission revealed that the domestic full-function GPU unicorn company Moore Thread applied for guidance and registration with the Beijing Securities Regulatory Bureau and officially launched the A-share listing process. The mentoring agency is CITIC Securities Co., Ltd.

Following Bijiao Technology and Suiyuan Technology, the third domestic AI chip unicorn Moore Thread has also completed registration. This also means that GPU companies that are targeting Nvidia are knocking on the capital market one after another.

Moore Thread was founded in October 2020. The founding team is from global GPU giant Nvidia. Zhang Jianzhong, the founder and CEO, was Nvidia's global vice president and general manager in China, and has been deeply involved in the GPU industry for nearly 20 years. According to the listing counseling filing report, Zhang Jianzhong controlled 44.07% of the company's shares.

The company uses full-function GPUs as the core to provide infrastructure and one-stop solutions for accelerated computing. Technically, Moore Threads are one of the few GPUs in China that can be compared to Nvidia in terms of functionality.

At present, Moore Thread is the only domestic GPU company with a layout on both the B-side and C-end in China. Its chip uses an advanced MUSA architecture and integrates the four major engines of AI computation acceleration, graphics rendering, video codec, physical simulation, and scientific computing.

The company's core product KUAE (KUAE) Intelligent Computing Center's full-stack solution includes infrastructure, cluster management platform (KAE Platform), and large model service platform (KAE ModelStudio) with the KUAE computing cluster as the core, which aims to solve large-scale GPU computing power construction and operation management problems through integrated delivery.

According to industry insiders close to Moore's thread, with changes in the computing paradigm, GPUs that combine graphics and AI computing have become mainstream general computing power, empowering a wide range of cutting-edge industries such as artificial intelligence, autonomous driving, digital twins, and physical intelligence. “For large-scale model training, Moore Thread has launched a nationally produced kilocalories intelligent computing cluster and launched its own 10,000 card cluster solution. Currently, AI chips are in the first tier in China.”

Wall Street News learned that the company has completed adaptations and tests with many large model companies such as Zhiyuan Research Institute, Intelligent Spectrum AI, and Wuyuan Xinqiong, which can provide computational support for training large models with 100 billion and trillion parameters.

In addition, Moore Thread launched the MTT S80, a domestic gaming video card in 2022. It is known as the “first domestic game card” and the only domestic consumer video card that can support DirectX 12. According to public information, Moore Thread's customers include leading operators, large state-owned banks, and large model startups.

In addition to products, Moore Thread is working to build a domestic GPU application ecosystem around the self-developed MUSA unified system architecture and software platform. The software ecosystem is the key to promoting the popularity of GPU computing. With the MUSA architecture as the core, Moore Thread has released a complete MUSA software stack to serve developers and end users.

The Moorish thread MUSA architecture and software stack are compatible with CUDA. Through the MUSIFY code automatic conversion tool, users can quickly and seamlessly migrate the original CUDA code to the MUSA platform. In addition, Moore Thread has launched a series of software based on domestic full-function GPUs to port the open source project MUSA, including the deep learning framework Torch-musa.

In the past few years, with the explosion of AI models around the world, Moorish thread valuations have also begun to increase rapidly.

At present, Moore Thread has completed six rounds of investment. Investors include well-known state-owned and venture capital institutions such as China Mobile, Shenzhen Venture Capital, Shanghai Guosheng, Bank of China International, CCB International, China Merchants Venture Capital, Zhongguancun Science City, and Sequoia Capital. The last round of financing took place in November 2023. Moore Thread completed a financing amount of hundreds of millions of yuan, and the post-investment valuation was about 30 billion yuan.

From Hurun's global unicorn list over the years, we can also see changes in Moore Thread's valuation.

In 2022, two years after its establishment, Moore Thread entered the list for the first time, with a valuation of 13 billion yuan and ranked 568. In April of this year, Hurun released the latest global unicorn list. Moore Thread scored 25.5 billion yuan and ranked 261.

The revolutionary industrial opportunities brought by AI will have a major impact on social and economic development. As a participant in AI infrastructure, Moore Threads has stepped at the right pace of the times and is ready to do a big job.

However, the challenges are also obvious; the Moore Thread still has a long way to go if it wants to close the gap with Nvidia.