News Chinese GPU Maker Raises $250 Million for Future GPU Development

[Admin]

Moore Threads raises $215 million in Series B funding from China Mobile and Hexe Health Insurance.

Chinese GPU Maker Raises $250 Million for Future GPU Development : Read more

 

[bit_user]

the Chunxiao-based MTT S80 16GB graphics card yet has to demonstrate its full potential in video games popular in Europe and the U.S. as it currently fails to beat even Nvidia's GeForce RTX 3060 despite its higher complexity and compute performance (14.4 FP32 TFLOPS vs 12.7 FP32 TFLOPS) due to imperfect drivers.

To be fair, you don't actually know that it's merely the drivers holding it back. Maybe there are scaling bottlenecks or imbalances in the architecture. It's really a leap of faith to ascribe the shortcoming entirely to "drivers", especially for a team lacking a track record of delivering any truly competitive solutions.

at least investors seem to be confident that over time the company will be able to at least partially replace Nvidia in China.

This is the key point. They know they'll receive preferential treatment in their domestic market, which is probably already enough for their company to be viable. Now that they've shown they can implement hardware that seems to have all the key specs, it's probably seen as a fairly low-risk investment.

 

[Co BIY]

An explanation as to why a Health Insurance Company would invest in GPU technology would be interesting.

 

[bit_user]

An explanation as to why a Health Insurance Company would invest in GPU technology would be interesting.

Insurance is just a financial product. Subscribers pay premiums; the insurer pays out claims. In between, they're sitting on a pile of cash that you could earn some returns on, which could theoretically benefit both the insurer and the subscribers, since investment income could boost profits and/or reduce premiums.

However, you'd expect them to invest in low-risk assets, with stable returns. I can understand taking on a little more risk, in a blended approach, but it does seem a bit extreme to go investing in startups. However, as the article mentions, perhaps they see it as more than a pure asset, and are instead focused on developing technology they want to use for the sake of their own claims and risk-analysis processes.

 

[Co BIY]

Insurance is just a financial product. Subscribers pay premiums; the insurer pays out claims. In between, they're sitting on a pile of cash that you could earn some returns on, which could theoretically benefit both the insurer and the subscribers, since investment income could boost profits and/or reduce premiums.

However, you'd expect them to invest in low-risk assets, with stable returns. I can understand taking on a little more risk, in a blended approach, but it does seem a bit extreme to go investing in startups. However, as the article mentions, perhaps they see it as more than a pure asset, and are instead focused on developing technology they want to use for the sake of their own claims and risk-analysis processes.

An Insurance company having a diversified portfolio of capital stocks that include a reasonable portion in aggressive growth stocks makes perfect sense.

Becoming a major capital investor in the same aggressive company might not be good for the stability of the company, economy or the insured customers.

OTOH - Investing in the interest of the social credits involved and with knowledge of what the countries' leaders consider "too important (too connected?) to fail" could make this as solid as any Chinese "Blue Chip" stock.

Note to self - Rewatch the Nicholson/Polanski masterpiece Chinatown and remember to take the titular point literally. (and multiply by the cultural gulf of the actual Pacific Ocean)

 

[bit_user]

Rewatch the Nicholson/Polanski masterpiece Chinatown and remember to take the titular point literally.

That would be ironic. One of the movie's subtexts was the discrimination and mistreatment of Chinese immigrants, in 1930's Los Angeles, which allowed lawlessness and corruption to fester there.

A more topical choice would be The China Hustle, which I thought was fairly entertaining, for a documentary.

 

[Co BIY]

That would be ironic. One of the movie's subtexts was the discrimination and mistreatment of Chinese immigrants, in 1930's Los Angeles, which allowed lawlessness and corruption to fester there.

A more topical choice would be The China Hustle, which I thought was fairly entertaining, for a documentary.

I understood it as closer to "the dynamics of Chinatown were so complex and foreign to the authorities that any action they took was likely to make things worse."

Like I said, I need to watch it again!