Photo: Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang presents the RTX Blackwell chip at CES 2025 in Las Vegas / Pronoia, Wikimedia Commons / CC0
By: JBizNews Desk 🌎
Moonshot AI, one of China’s leading artificial intelligence labs, has sought to rent access to Nvidia’s most advanced chips inside European data centers, a way around American rules that block the chips from being sold to China, CNBC reported, citing four people familiar with the matter.
The talks, held this year, were about renting computing power from so-called neoclouds, companies that run large numbers of Nvidia graphics chips and rent out capacity. Three of the people said Moonshot wanted clusters built on Nvidia’s Blackwell systems, the chipmaker’s newest and most powerful line. U.S. export controls effectively ban those chips from being shipped to China, but the law does not give regulators broad power to stop a Chinese company from using them remotely through data centers overseas, a gap often described as a loophole.
Two of the people said Moonshot was interested in clusters for inference, the work of running finished models for users. One said there was also interest in clusters for training new models. Talks covered arrangements for clusters of 8,000 or more Blackwell chips, one person said, describing Moonshot as “very aggressive” in its hunt for computing power. None of the people said a deal had been completed.
One person said it was proposed that Moonshot pay 30% to 50% more upfront than a non-Chinese customer, because cloud providers and their lenders want protection in case Washington later bans remote-access arrangements.
Some of the talks took place after July, when the White House said Moonshot had accessed Blackwell chips through a facility in Thailand, one person said. Moonshot did not comment at the time.
Moonshot, founded in 2023 and based in Beijing, builds the Kimi family of AI models. It said a new model released in July closed the gap with leading systems from American labs OpenAI and Anthropic, and it briefly paused new subscriptions, saying demand had stretched its computing capacity. Chinese AI models have surged in global adoption this year, helped by lower prices.
Lawmakers in Washington have proposed closing the loophole with the Remote Access Security Act, which would extend export controls to cloud-based access to advanced hardware. It passed the House of Representatives in January but has not passed the Senate. The Financial Times reported this week that Nvidia has told cloud providers renting access to its chips that they must sell at least 51% of services to non-Chinese customers. Nvidia said in August that Washington had licensed some sales of its older H200 chips to China, but that Beijing restricted those sales as it pushes domestic chipmakers.
“America cannot win the AI race unless America’s AI infrastructure wins worldwide,” an Nvidia spokesperson said when asked about the reports.
Moonshot, Nvidia, the White House, the U.S. Department of Commerce, China’s embassy in the U.K. and China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs did not respond to CNBC’s requests for comment.
JBizNews Desk | BEIJING
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