Chinese AI Lab Moonshot Sought Nvidia Blackwell GPU Access Through European Cloud Providers to Sidestep US Export Controls

Moonshot AI, the Chinese artificial intelligence company behind the Kimi chatbot, has held talks to rent clusters of Nvidia Blackwell GPUs housed in European data centers, an effort to secure advanced computing capacity that US export controls bar from being shipped directly to China, according to sources cited by CNBC.

The discussions involved accessing clusters of 8,000 or more Blackwell GPUs from European neoclouds, to be used primarily for inference and potentially model training. One proposed arrangement would have seen Moonshot pay 30% to 50% more upfront than non-Chinese customers, a premium that reflects the risk a provider would take on given the possibility of future regulatory restrictions.

US export controls prohibit the physical shipment of advanced Nvidia chips to China but do not broadly bar Chinese companies from remotely accessing equivalent computing power through overseas cloud providers. That regulatory gap is under scrutiny in Washington, where legislation to close the loophole is reportedly under consideration. The White House had previously accused Moonshot of accessing Blackwell chips remotely through a data center in Thailand. No completed deal with a European provider has been confirmed.