What's happening
Moonshot AI, the Chinese lab behind the Kimi models, has reportedly turned to Europe to gain access to the latest Nvidia Blackwell AI GPUs. According to a CNBC report, the company is in talks with at least one European data center to lease clusters with 8,000 or more GPUs.
Why Europe?
The US bans Chinese companies from buying advanced Nvidia chips such as Blackwell. Renting compute from data centers abroad, however, has so far offered a way around the restriction. Moonshot's interest is mainly in inference capacity — the compute needed to run trained models — though it has also asked about capacity for training.
A loophole that may close
The US House has passed the Remote Access Security Act to patch this gap, but the bill still needs Senate and White House approval before becoming law. In the meantime, Chinese labs continue training models on foreign data centers that hold Nvidia chips.
A narrowing window
Nvidia has reportedly told its data center clients to avoid serving more than 49% of their capacity to Chinese outfits, suggesting Moonshot has limited time to secure compute outside China.
