Moonshot AI Rented Servers With Nvidia's Banned B300 Chips in China, Filings Show

The B300 is part of Nvidia's Blackwell generation, which Washington bars from export to China. The filings indicate that the company behind the Kimi models had access to Nvidia's most advanced chips inside China this summer, despite US export controls. That differs from the offshore routes Chinese developers have usually relied on, renting capacity in data centres in Southeast Asia and elsewhere. The documents seen by Bloomberg also showed Alibaba and ByteDance signing contracts earlier this year for access to offshore Nvidia chips.

The report adds to a run of disclosures about how Moonshot has sought computing power. In the summer, Michael Kratsios, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, said the company had reached Blackwell chips through a facility in Thailand. On November 5, CNBC reported, citing four people familiar with the matter, that Moonshot had held talks to rent clusters of 8,000 or more Blackwell GPUs hosted by cloud providers in Europe. The capacity was mainly for inference, the work of serving its models to users. One source told CNBC Moonshot was offered terms requiring 30% to 50% more upfront payment than a non-Chinese customer would pay.

The Beijing-based company, founded in 2023, released a model in July that narrowed the gap with leading systems from OpenAI and Anthropic. It later paused new subscriptions because of demand, saying it was "adding capacity as fast as we can", according to CNBC.

The legal position on remote access remains unsettled. Current US law gives regulators no broad authority over Chinese companies using restricted chips through cloud services hosted abroad. The Remote Access Security Act, which would extend export controls to cloud-based access, passed the House in January but has not cleared the Senate. Nvidia has told cloud partners to sell at least 51% of their services to non-Chinese customers, the Financial Times has reported.

How servers holding B300 chips came to be available for rent in China is not explained in the reporting so far. Super Micro has previously been drawn into a Justice Department investigation into illegal chip sales to China involving three of its employees, Investing.com noted in its account of the Bloomberg report. Moonshot, Nvidia and US officials did not respond to CNBC's requests for comment on its earlier report.

The disclosure lands while Nvidia's relationship with China is under heavy scrutiny in Washington. The company's board is reviewing chief executive Jensen Huang's ties to a woman reported to be a Chinese intelligence asset. House Democrats have asked the Commerce Department to halt AI chip exports to China, and backers of chip-export bills in the Senate's defence package say the case improves their chances. Evidence that top-tier Blackwell hardware reached a Chinese lab on the mainland could be used to argue for tighter controls on both direct sales and cloud access when Congress takes up the defence bill.