Moonshot AI, the Beijing-based developer of the Kimi model family, has held talks with European neocloud providers about leasing clusters of 8,000 or more Nvidia Corp. Blackwell GPUs, according to CNBC1,5. No agreement has been confirmed.
The discussions center mainly on inference workloads but also touch on training capacity6. One person familiar with the talks described Moonshot's pursuit of European compute as very aggressive. Three people familiar with the discussions told CNBC the company has been actively seeking additional capacity in Europe.
Prior access and the Thailand episode
The White House previously accused Moonshot of accessing Nvidia's advanced chips remotely in East Asia. U.S. Chief Technology Officer Michael Kratsios said Moonshot had acquired GB300-equipped servers and accessed GB300s in Thailand, likely to train its AI models. A July 2026 Bloomberg report cited by Reuters said Moonshot had access to approximately 20,000 Nvidia chips through an agreement with Alibaba, though Alibaba disputed claims that it had supplied H200 chips.
The European route represents a different vector: rather than smuggling chips or relying on stockpiled inventory, Moonshot would rent compute power hosted on European soil, accessing the same infrastructure that powers Western AI development while remaining physically outside China4.
Pricing and policy pressure
European operators are reportedly asking Chinese clients for 30% to 50% higher upfront payments to offset regulatory risk. Nvidia has asked cloud partners to reserve at least 51% of capacity for non-Chinese customers.
Washington is moving to close the remote-access loophole. The U.S. House passed the Remote Access Security Act in January to restrict foreign cloud access to restricted hardware; the bill is now before the Senate. Current trade rules bar direct shipments of top-tier accelerators such as Blackwell to China, yet cross-border cloud leasing has largely remained outside the reach of existing controls.
Nvidia has developed export-compliant chips with reduced capabilities for the Chinese market, but those processors do not approach Blackwell's performance. Nvidia declined to comment on specific customer arrangements through third-party cloud providers.
Moonshot's compute hunger
Moonshot launched Kimi K3 in July 2026, describing it as a 2.8-trillion-parameter open-weight model designed for advanced reasoning, coding, and knowledge-intensive tasks. Following a surge in demand, Moonshot temporarily paused new subscriptions to Kimi K3 to prioritize computing resources for existing users. Multiple Chinese AI labs are exploring similar arrangements with neoclouds, according to reporting on the deals.
ANALYSIS The European neocloud route tests a gap between Washington's hardware export controls and the absence of binding restrictions on remote cloud access from abroad, a gap the Remote Access Security Act is designed to close if the Senate acts.