US media: China's Moonshot AI seeks to rent advanced Nvidia chip computing power in Europe

Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) startup Moonshot AI is reportedly seeking to rent computing power from advanced AI chips made by US chip giant Nvidia through data centers in Europe, in order to circumvent restrictions under US chip export controls on China.

US business news channel CNBC reported on Thursday (November 5), citing four people familiar with the matter, that Moonshot AI held talks this year with several emerging cloud service providers operating data centers in Europe about renting computing power provided by Nvidia graphics processing units (GPUs).

Three of the sources said Moonshot AI was mainly seeking to rent Nvidia's latest Blackwell series chips.

One source said the two sides had discussed renting computing clusters with 8,000 or more Blackwell chips deployed in Europe.

The sources described the Chinese AI lab as "very aggressive" in seeking more computing resources.

Another source said Moonshot AI mainly hopes to use the chips for AI model inference, meaning providing model services to end users, but is also interested in obtaining computing resources for training models.

The United States currently bans exports to China of Nvidia's most advanced AI chips, but existing law does not yet give regulators broad authority to restrict Chinese companies from remotely using these chips through overseas cloud services, leaving room for Chinese AI companies to obtain advanced computing resources.

The White House said in July this year that Moonshot AI had remotely used Nvidia Blackwell chips through a data center in Thailand.

Sources said that after the White House made those allegations, Moonshot AI also held talks on renting computing power from European data centers.

According to reports, amid concerns that the United States may further tighten restrictions on remote use in the future, some cloud service providers and financing institutions hope to reduce risk by collecting higher upfront payments.

One source said there had been proposals requiring Moonshot AI to pay upfront payments 30% to 50% higher than those of non-Chinese customers.

Founded in 2023, Moonshot AI is one of China's major AI large-model developers and owns the Kimi series of models.

As model performance improves and user demand grows, the company is actively expanding its computing resources.