Chinese AI lab Moonshot reportedly looked at European data centers to access Nvidia chips, report claims

Chinese AI lab Moonshot reportedly looked at European data centers to access Nvidia chips, report claims — Kimi-maker primarily interested in inferencing capacity, but also asked about training clusters

Chinese AI labs are attempting to export their data since they cannot import Nvidia GPUs.

Moonshot AI, the Chinese lab that made Kimi, is reportedly looking towards Europe to gain access to the latest Nvidia Blackwell AI GPUs. According to CNBC, the company is in talks with at least one European data center to lease clusters with 8,000 or more GPUs for inferencing, and that it’s also interested in securing compute capacity for training.

While Chinese companies are banned from acquiring Nvidia Blackwell and other AI GPUs that offer the same or better performance containing U.S. technologies, a loophole has so far allowed them to gain access to compute by renting them from data centers abroad. The U.S. House is attempting to patch it and passed the Remote Access Security Act, but it must still go through the Senate and the White House before it can turn into law. In the meantime, Chinese AI labs are exploiting the loophole and training their models on foreign data centers that have acquired Nvidia chips.

The U.S. and China have been locked in an AI arms race, with the latter’s open-weight models behind frontier U.S. models by just a matter of months. More importantly, these models, like Kimi K3, are significantly easier to run and could even be much cheaper to use. These advancements happened despite Washington’s efforts to make it harder for Chinese AI labs to acquire hardware that uses American technologies through export bans. But even though President Donald Trump eventually made a 180-degree turn and allowed Nvidia H200 chips for export to China, Beijing has taken steps to protect its domestic AI chip industry by blocking H200 imports at the border, meaning these companies must look elsewhere if they want to access the latest, most powerful AI GPUs to train their models.

Moonshot also has a limited window if it wants to secure compute capacity outside of China — Nvidia has reportedly told its data center clients to limit their business and avoid serving more than 49% of their capacity to Chinese outfits. This could be a harbinger of things to come, especially as reports like these could spotlight the bipartisan bill and increase pressure to advance the legislation sooner rather than later.

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Jowi Morales is a tech enthusiast with years of experience working in the industry. He’s been writing with several tech publications since 2021, where he’s been interested in tech hardware and consumer electronics.