Moonshot AI has explored new ways to obtain advanced semiconductor capacity for its artificial intelligence models despite stringent trade restrictions imposed by the U.S. government. The company, which develops the Kimi AI models, held negotiations to rent clusters of 8,000 or more Nvidia Blackwell GPUs from European cloud providers to perform model training and inference. According to CNBC, Moonshot offered to pay 30% to 50% more in upfront costs than non-Chinese customers to account for the risk of future regulatory shifts.
The proposed arrangement targets a regulatory gap where U.S. export controls block the physical shipment of advanced chips to China but do not broadly prohibit remote access through overseas providers. The White House has previously alleged that Moonshot used a similar loophole to access Blackwell chips via a facility in Thailand. No deal has been confirmed for the European capacity, though Washington is considering legislation to close the loophole.