Chinese AI Lab Moonshot Sought Nvidia Blackwell Access in Europe to Sidestep US Chip Curbs

Moonshot AI cannot import Nvidia's best chips into China. So the Beijing lab behind the Kimi models has been shopping for them in Europe instead, looking to rent Blackwell capacity from cloud providers whose data centers sit well outside the reach of US export rules.

Moonshot discussed deals this year to rent capacity from neoclouds hosting Nvidia GPUs at European facilities, four people familiar with the talks told CNBC. Three of them said it wanted Blackwell systems, the advanced chips that US export controls effectively ban from entering China.

None of the sources described a signed deal. What they described was appetite. Moonshot looked at clusters of 8,000 or more Blackwell GPUs, and one person called the company "very aggressive" in its hunt for compute.

The loophole Washington already spotted

Moonshot has done this before. In July, the White House said the company had accessed Nvidia Blackwell chips through a facility in Thailand.

The workaround is simple. Export controls govern where chips ship, not who logs into them. Current law does not give regulators broad authority to control a company's access to those chips through cloud services hosted overseas.

Moonshot's interest in Europe was mainly for inference, running its models for users, though one source was also aware of interest in training.

A premium for the risk

The neoclouds and their financiers know the window could close. Proposals had Moonshot paying 30% to 50% more upfront than a non-Chinese customer would, a hedge against a future ban on remote access.

That ban is not imaginary. The House passed the Remote Access Security Act in January, which would extend export controls to cloud-based access. The Senate has not passed it.

Washington has not waited for Congress, either. Oracle just scrapped a roughly $7 billion chip lease with Tencent in Southeast Asia after US officials raised concerns. European remote access remains the kind of deal no rule clearly blocks.

Nvidia has also stepped in. The Financial Times reported that it told cloud providers they must sell at least 51% of their services to non-Chinese customers. An Nvidia spokesperson framed the company's position around US AI infrastructure needing to win worldwide.

Why Moonshot is so hungry

Moonshot was founded in Beijing in 2023. In July it released a model it claimed closed the gap with Anthropic and OpenAI, and demand has outrun its hardware: the company temporarily paused new subscriptions amid a capacity crunch.

Moonshot, Nvidia, the White House, the Commerce Department, China's embassy in the UK and China's foreign ministry did not comment.

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