China’s chip champion Moore Threads sees beyond silicon with push into AI coding

Moore Threads – one of China’s domestic artificial intelligence chip champions – has entered the intensifying race for AI coding tools with the launch of a new service built on its latest graphics processing unit (GPU).

The Beijing-based company on Tuesday unveiled its “AI Coding Plan”, a vertically integrated development suite that runs on a fully domestic hardware-to-model stack, marking a strategic push beyond chipmaking into developer-facing software services.

AI coding has emerged as a key battleground for both US and Chinese technology firms, putting Moore Threads into direct competition with Western incumbents such as Microsoft’s Copilot and Cursor, as well as domestic players including Alibaba Group Holding. Alibaba owns the South China Morning Post.

The new service is powered by Moore Threads’ MTT S5000 GPU, based on its fourth-generation Pinghu architecture, which entered mass production in 2025.

The chip has become a core revenue driver for the company, which said earlier this month that it expected revenue to triple this year.

Moore Threads said the launch represented “a key breakthrough” for home-grown chips and large-scale models in AI coding, arguing that China had overcome a long-standing bottleneck in AI productivity tools by relying on domestic computing power.