Chinese AI lab Moonshot AI has discussed paying a premium to rent Nvidia’s Blackwell chips at data centers in Europe, according to people familiar with the matter who spoke to CNBC. The sources asked not to be named because the information is private.
One source said it had been proposed that Moonshot pay 30% to 50% more upfront than a non-Chinese customer would. The talks took place this year and involve renting capacity from neoclouds, which are cloud companies that host Nvidia graphics processing units.
Blackwell chips are among Nvidia’s most advanced products. U.S. export controls effectively ban their import into China.
Why Chinese Customers Pay More Upfront
Leasing AI computing power has become a fast-growing business. Customers, known as offtakers, usually pay a fee for capacity plus an upfront cost to secure the deal. That upfront cost is a percentage of the contract’s lifetime value.
Deals with Chinese customers can bring in more money at the start. Neoclouds and financing firms use the higher upfront payments to protect themselves against a possible future ban on remote access deals.
One source said talks covered clusters of 8,000 or more Blackwell GPUs hosted in Europe. The same source described Moonshot as “very aggressive” in its search for more computing power.
Two sources said Moonshot wanted capacity for inference, which means serving AI models to users. One source said there was also interest in clusters for training models.
To rent this capacity, a Chinese company would typically work with a non-Chinese operator that can buy advanced chips. One source said the European talks happened after the White House said in July that Moonshot had used Blackwell chips through a facility in Thailand.
Demand for Kimi Models Drives Search for Compute
Moonshot was founded in 2023 and is based in Beijing. It builds the Kimi family of AI models and competes with U.S. labs such as OpenAI and Anthropic.
In July, Moonshot released Kimi K3, which it said closed the gap with leading U.S. systems. The model gained wide use as a cheaper option than American products.
Around the time of the launch, Moonshot said demand had stretched its capacity. It paused new subscriptions to give current members priority. “We’re adding capacity as fast as we can and will reopen new subscription spots in batches,” the company said in a LinkedIn post.
Current U.S. law does not give regulators broad power to control access to chips through cloud services based overseas. This gap lets Chinese firms use advanced chips without importing them.
Lawmakers have proposed the Remote Access Security Act to extend export controls to cloud-based access. The bill passed the House of Representatives in January but has not passed the Senate.
Nvidia said in August that Washington had licensed some sales of its older H200 chips to China. The company said those sales were restricted by the Chinese government, which wants to support domestic chipmakers.
Moonshot, Nvidia, the White House, the Commerce Department and Chinese officials did not respond to CNBC’s requests for comment.
The Financial Times reported on Tuesday that Nvidia told cloud providers they must sell at least 51% of their services to non-Chinese customers. Asked about the reports, an Nvidia spokesperson said, “America cannot win the AI race unless America’s AI infrastructure wins worldwide.”
