Nvidia
Moonshot AI, the Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) lab previously accused by the White House of remotely tapping into advanced Nvidia chips in East Asia, has been looking to secure access to those same restricted processors through European data centers, CNBC has reported.
Citing four people familiar with the private discussions, the report said that talks have taken place this year for Moonshot to rent computing capacity from “neoclouds” hosting Nvidia GPUs inside European facilities. Moonshot is the maker of the Kimi AI assistant and in September, the company was accused by Anthropic of unauthorised model distillation and terms-of-service violations by secretly routing user requests through Claude.
Founded in 2023, Beijing-based Moonshot AI is one of China’s premier model builders, known for its Kimi family of AI models. Meanwhile, the Financial Times reported last week that Nvidia has instructed cloud providers selling access to its chips that at least 51% of their services must go to non-Chinese customers. In July, the company released a new model that it claimed closed the performance gap with leading systems from US rivals like OpenAI and Anthropic.
Responding to those reports, an Nvidia spokesperson said: “America cannot win the AI race unless America’s AI infrastructure wins worldwide — if the world’s clouds rely on foreign-made chips, the model and application layers will be foreign-built as well. ” CNBC reports that Moonshot has been trying to lease capacity powered by Nvidia’s Blackwell systems, the cutting-edge chips that are effectively barred from being imported into China under US export controls. renting them remotely through overseas data centers remains a legal gray area While US export rules block the physical shipment of Nvidia’s most advanced hardware to China. Current US law does not give regulators broad authority to stop foreign companies from accessing restricted chips via cloud services hosted abroad.