The chipmaker has mandated that cloud providers reserve a majority of their hardware for customers outside of China to hinder the evasion of trade bans on advanced semiconductors. New contracts must designate at least 51% of GPU services to non-Chinese clients, a measure intended to curb the use of overseas data centers as a workaround for U.S. export controls. Washington is considering further legislation to close the current regulatory gap that allows Chinese firms to rent remote access to chips held abroad.
The restrictions follow reports that the developer of the Kimi AI model, Moonshot AI, sought to lease clusters of 8,000 or more Blackwell GPUs from cloud providers in Europe. To mitigate the risk of future sanctions, the lab reportedly offered to pay 30% to 50% more in upfront costs than customers based outside China. In July, the White House alleged that Moonshot had already used a similar loop hole to access Blackwell hardware through a facility in Thailand.