Moonshot AI Sought Nvidia Blackwell Access Through European Data Centers, Sources Say

Moonshot AI, the Chinese artificial intelligence lab accused by the White House of remotely tapping Nvidia's advanced chips in East Asia, has sought access to the same technology through data centers in Europe, sources have told CNBC.

Four people familiar with the matter said deals were discussed this year under which Moonshot would rent capacity from neocloud providers hosting Nvidia graphics processing units at European facilities. The sources asked not to be named because the talks were private.

Nvidia's effective monopoly on the most powerful chips has turned U.S. export controls into a central tool of Washington's push to preserve its edge over China in the AI race. American labs such as OpenAI and Anthropic are locked in a training and pricing battle with Chinese developers, among them Moonshot, the maker of the Kimi family of models.

Three of the sources said Moonshot was looking to lease capacity powered by Nvidia's Blackwell systems, chips that fall under export controls effectively banning their import into China. In July, the White House said the Chinese lab had accessed Blackwell chips through a facility in Thailand. While U.S. rules restrict shipments of Nvidia's top chips to China, remote access through overseas data centers remains a loophole, since current law does not give regulators broad authority over cloud services hosted abroad.

Two sources said Moonshot was interested in leasing European clusters for inference, meaning serving models to end users, while one said they were also aware of interest in training clusters. Talks have taken place over arrangements that would give Moonshot access to clusters of 8,000 or more Blackwell GPUs in the region, one source said, describing the lab as "very aggressive" in its hunt for computing power. Another source said negotiations on European compute had occurred since the White House's Thailand claim, which Moonshot declined to comment on at the time.

Founded in 2023 and based in Beijing, Moonshot is one of China's leading model builders. It released a new model in July that it said closed the gap with leading systems from Anthropic and OpenAI, and it saw significant uptake as a cheaper alternative to U.S. offerings. Around the time Kimi K3 launched, Moonshot said demand had stretched its capacity and it temporarily paused new subscriptions. "We're adding capacity as fast as we can and will reopen new subscription spots in batches," the company said in a LinkedIn post.

Leasing AI compute is a booming business in which customers typically pay an upfront fee representing a percentage of the lifetime contract value. One source said it was proposed that Moonshot pay 30% to 50% more upfront than a non-Chinese customer would. Such arrangements can be more lucrative for neoclouds and their financing partners, which are hedging against the risk that remote access agreements could one day be banned.

In Washington, lawmakers have proposed the Remote Access Security Act to extend export controls to cloud-based access to critical hardware and software. The bill passed the House of Representatives in January but has not cleared the Senate. Separately, the Financial Times reported earlier this week that Nvidia told cloud providers selling access to its chips that they must sell at least 51% of services to non-Chinese customers. Asked about the reports, an Nvidia spokesperson said: "America cannot win the AI race unless America's AI infrastructure wins worldwide."

Nvidia said in August that Washington had licensed some sales of its older-generation H200 AI chips, but that "such sales were restricted" by the Chinese government, which has limited access to Nvidia products in a bid to boost domestic chipmakers. 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 requests for comment.