Moore Threads now lets you connect up to 10,000 GPUs in a cluster for AI

Chinese graphics card maker Moore Threads has announced an upgrade to its MTLink technology that now allows up to 10,000 GPUs to be connected in a single cluster for AI. The upgrade affects KUAE servers, which integrate eight of the company’s MTT S4000 GPUs.

Moore Threads came up with plans to offer an affordable alternative to current graphics card models, but the performance of its products has been disappointing. It seems that the manufacturer has decided to appeal to quantity and win by numbers. Or at least tie.

Tom’s Hardware did the math. The MTT S4000 is based on the MUSA architecture, which offers 128 tensor cores per unit. So a cluster with 10,000 cards totals 1,280,000 tensor cores. The performance of over a million cores sounds promising, but it would need to be tested in practice.

Moore Threads’ solution, however, could offer a specific advantage for generative AI. According to the manufacturer, its proprietary MTLink technology for interconnecting boards was developed specifically for large-scale language models, the famous LLMs.

Moore Threads faces US sanctions

Like most Chinese tech companies, Moore Threads has struggled to develop its products. U.S. sanctions on China prevent it from accessing cutting-edge technologies needed to create advanced GPUs like its competitors. The MTT S4000 maker has even been placed on the Biden administration’s blacklist.

Given the limitations of the domestic models offered by the company, it is possible that many companies will prefer to risk smuggling Nvidia GPUs. A100 models, for example, are very popular in China, and already offer between 624 and 1248 INT8 TOPS. The MTT S400 only comes with 200 INT8 TOPS.

Moore Threads hopes to establish partnerships with government-owned companies. The company has already signed partnerships with carriers such as China Mobile and China Unicom, as well as with other companies such as China Energy Engineering Corp. and Gulin Huajue Big Data Technology. Through these agreements, the company aims to advance its AI capabilities, and by extension, the country as a whole.