AI unicorn Moore Threads plans IPO amid US sanctions

Moore Threads, a Chinese AI unicorn firm, has filed for an initial public offering (IPO) in the domestic market.

Founded by a former leader of NVIDIA China, Moore Threads' listing will bolster its capital and enhance its competitiveness in the GPU and AI chip market, Shanghai Daily learned on Wednesday.

A unicorn firm is a private firm, usually a technology startup, valued more than US$1 billion.

The move aligns with China's broader strategy to strengthen its domestic chip and AI infrastructure, particularly in the face of US technology sanctions. China is enhancing domestic production of advanced chips following US restrictions on NVIDIA advanced GPUs for AI training.

A Moore Threads pre-listing register file on a China Securities Regulatory Commission (CSRC) website on Wednesday marked the official start of IPO process.

The Nasdaq-like Shanghai STAR Market is the firm's priority choice of IPO. It's a relatively board founded to boost innovation and core-technology development.

Moore Threads was founded by Jams Zhang, a former leader of NVIDIA China and a veteran executive in the GPU and chip industry.

Moore Threads is the only domestic GPU company with portfolios targeting both enterprise and consumer markets, like NVIDIA. The products integrate four major engines: AI compute acceleration, graphics rendering, video coding and decoding and physical simulation and scientific computing.

At the World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai this summer, the company showcased KUAE, a full-stack AI data center solution build based on the company's MTT S4000 GPU and related processors. This integrated solution enables the efficient deployment of large-scale AI computing power with up to 10,000 GPUs.

According to industry experts, Moore Threads' S4000 GPU boasts a performance roughly 60 percent on par with NVIDIA's A100, a model currently unavailable domestically due to US sanctions.

The IPO news fueled the capital market, especially in semiconductor sectors, as Moore Threads is labelled as a "NVIDIA-like" firm in China.