Moonshot AI signed a contract in August to rent 32 Supermicro servers equipped with Nvidia Corp.'s B300 GPUs — the most powerful AI accelerators on the market — with the hardware located inside China, according to documents filed with Beijing regulators and reviewed by Bloomberg News1,2.
The online filings valued the 32 servers at 432 million yuan ($64.8 million), implying a per-server value of 13.5 million yuan ($2 million). The servers' presence in China points to a possible breach of U.S. rules that forbid sales of advanced AI chips to the country without an explicit license.
The documents consist of two financing contracts signed on August 4 by Lingmeixin (Beijing) Technology Co. and Beijing Zhongguancun Bank Co.. The bank submitted the filings to the database on August 6. Under the agreements, Lingmeixin provided dual collateral for a 200 million yuan ($30 million) loan to purchase the servers: the physical servers themselves and earnings of 345.6 million yuan derived from a service contract signed with Beijing Dark Side of the Moon Technology Co.. Lingmeixin said the hardware purchased with the financing was designated for fulfilling a service contract with Moonshot and that Moonshot only has the right to use the compute service, with no ownership of the equipment.
The servers are stored in the western Chinese city of Qingyang.
Moonshot disputed the accuracy of the documents, said it had no knowledge of the related financing or guarantee arrangements, and said it neither participated in nor authorized them. Moonshot also said it currently has no business relationship with Lingmeixin.
ANALYSIS The filings surface a concrete case of top-tier Nvidia hardware reportedly operating inside China at a time when U.S. export controls are under heightened scrutiny, with Nvidia already facing separate board-level pressure over its CEO's ties to a person identified by U.S. intelligence agencies as a Chinese spy[3].