diff --git a/llmfoundry/models/layers/attention.py b/llmfoundry/models/layers/attention.py
index 76b3cb0d58..9adaed7ec1 100644
--- a/llmfoundry/models/layers/attention.py
+++ b/llmfoundry/models/layers/attention.py
@@ -312,14 +312,10 @@ def triton_flash_attn_fn(
                       h=1 if multiquery else n_heads)
 
     if multiquery:
-        # Expanding a tensor does not allocate new memory, but only creates a new
-        # view on the existing tensor where a dimension of size one is expanded
-        # to a larger size by setting the stride to 0.
-        # - pytorch docs
-        #
-        # hopefully the kernels can utilize this and we're jot just wasting BW here
-        key = key.expand(*key.shape[:2], n_heads, key.size(-1))
-        value = value.expand(*value.shape[:2], n_heads, value.size(-1))
+        # necessary to repeat instead of expand tensor because
+        # output contains NaN in edge cases such as with head dimension = 8
+        key = key.repeat(1, 1, n_heads, 1)
+        value = value.repeat(1, 1, n_heads, 1)
 
     reset_is_causal = _reset_is_causal(query.size(1), key.size(1), is_causal)
     attn_output = flash_attn_func(query, key, value, attn_bias, reset_is_causal,
diff --git a/tests/test_model.py b/tests/test_model.py
index 0a13ecd145..5266b82622 100644
--- a/tests/test_model.py
+++ b/tests/test_model.py
@@ -1385,3 +1385,46 @@ def test_hf_init(tmp_path,
     updated_params = next(model.parameters()).clone().data
 
     assert not torch.equal(original_params, updated_params)
+
+
+@pytest.mark.gpu
+def test_head_dim_8_triton_mqa_attn(batch_size=2):
+    test_cfg = get_config(conf_path='scripts/train/yamls/pretrain/testing.yaml')
+    test_cfg.device = torch.cuda.current_device()
+
+    test_cfg.batch_size = batch_size
+
+    hf_config = MPTConfig(
+        init_device='cpu',
+        d_model=128,
+        n_heads=16,
+        n_layers=1,
+        expansion_ratio=2,
+        max_seq_len=128,
+        emb_pdrop=0.1,
+        resid_pdrop=0.2,
+        attn_config={
+            'attn_impl': 'triton',
+            'attn_type': 'multiquery_attention'
+        },
+    )
+    test_cfg.device = torch.cuda.current_device()
+
+    tokenizer = build_tokenizer(test_cfg.tokenizer)
+
+    mpt = MPTForCausalLM(hf_config)
+
+    model = HuggingFaceModelWithZLoss(mpt, tokenizer, shift_labels=True)
+
+    model = model.to(test_cfg.device)
+    batch = gen_random_batch(batch_size, test_cfg)
+
+    assert batch['input_ids'].shape == torch.Size(
+        [batch_size, test_cfg.max_seq_len])
+
+    model.train()
+
+    with torch.cuda.amp.autocast(enabled=True, dtype=torch.bfloat16):
+        output = model(batch)
+
+    assert not torch.isnan(output.logits).any()