Huawei monopolizes much of the attention when we turn our gaze to Chinese designers and manufacturers of artificial intelligence (AI) chips that can compete head-to-head with NVIDIA or AMD. However, in the country led by Xi Jinping there are many other companies specialized in developing hardware for AI that also have great potential. MetaX, Biren Technology, Innosilicon, Zhaoxin, Iluvatar CoreX, DenglinAI or Vast AI Tech are some of the most important.
“China is devoting massive resources to starting up startups specializing in GPU development. Don’t underestimate them.” This warning was probably not ignored. It was addressed to the US Government and came from someone who knows what he is saying: Jensen Huang. The CEO of NVIDIA spoke these words last year, during the Computex celebration, and it is evident that his intention was to warn the US Administration about the consequences that the sanctions that seek to stop China’s technological development would have.
However, Huang is not the only executive of an American technology company who takes Xi Jinping’s country’s innovation capacity in the field of AI very seriously. Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Alphabet, the corporation to which Google belongs, is convinced that “the scale of the work that China is carrying out in the field of AI is astonishing (…) China is going to be behind the vanguard in this discipline. It is a fact,” said Pichai in mid-November of last year.
The US is keeping a close eye on Moore Threads
This company has appeared on the blacklist drawn up by the US Government since October of last year. Moore Threads is one of the Chinese organizations dedicated to the production of AI hardware to which companies aligned with the interests of the US and its allies cannot sell advanced software or equipment. Although it is very young (it was founded in 2020) it has something very important in its favor: its founder is Zhang Jianzhong, former general manager of NVIDIA’s subsidiary in China, so it is evident that he knows well what he has on his hands.
The MTT S4000 and MTT S3000 cards are the most interesting proposals from Moore Threads right now
Moore Threads has developed several GPUs for AI applications that, on paper, rival some of the advanced solutions that NVIDIA, AMD or Huawei have put on the market. The MTT S4000 cards (it is the one you can see in the cover image of this article) and MTT S3000 are your most interesting proposals right now, although, curiously, the MTT S80 card also appears in its portfolio, a proposal for games and content creation that, according to Moore Threads itself, has a computing capacity of 14.4 TFLOPS in precision floating point operations simple. It’s not impressive, but it’s not bad at all.
Currently this company does not have the capacity to compete with NVIDIA outside of China, but its future looks very interesting. Over the last four years, Moore Threads has received a total investment of about $800 million from more than two dozen investors. Among them are Chinese technology companies ByteDance and Tencent. However, this is by no means all. And SCMP has anticipated that it is preparing its IPO. If so, its financial muscle and its capacity for innovation will presumably be reinforced, so it will surely consolidate itself as one of the main Chinese players in the AI industry.
Imagen | Moore Threads
More information | SCMP
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