Moonshot AI, the Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) lab previously accused by the White House of remotely tapping into advanced Nvidia chips in East Asia, has been looking to secure access to those same restricted processors through European data centers, CNBC has reported. Citing four people familiar with the private discussions, the report said that talks have taken place this year for Moonshot to rent computing capacity from “neoclouds” hosting Nvidia GPUs inside European facilities. Moonshot is the maker of the Kimi AI assistant and in September, the company was accused by Anthropic of unauthorised model distillation and terms-of-service violations by secretly routing user requests through Claude.
Moonshot AI’s ‘European workaround’
CNBC reports that Moonshot has been trying to lease capacity powered by Nvidia’s Blackwell systems, the cutting-edge chips that are effectively barred from being imported into China under US export controls. While US export rules block the physical shipment of Nvidia’s most advanced hardware to China, renting them remotely through overseas data centers remains a legal gray area. Current US law does not give regulators broad authority to stop foreign companies from accessing restricted chips via cloud services hosted abroad.To get around the bottleneck in Europe, a Chinese AI firm typically leases capacity from a non-Chinese neocloud or data center operator that is legally allowed to buy the chips.Two sources told the publication that Moonshot was looking to rent European clusters for inference while one source noted the lab was also interested in clusters for model training. Discussions have included deals for Moonshot to access clusters of 8,000 or more Blackwell GPUs in the region. One source described the lab as “very aggressive” in its hunt for computing power, adding that talks in Europe have continued even after the White House accused Moonshot in July of accessing Blackwell chips through a facility in Thailand.
AI companies racing to meet surging demand
Founded in 2023, Beijing-based Moonshot AI is one of China’s premier model builders, known for its Kimi family of AI models. In July, the company released a new model that it claimed closed the performance gap with leading systems from US rivals like OpenAI and Anthropic.Lower costs and improved capabilities have fueled a surge in global adoption for Chinese AI models throughout 2026. Around the launch of Kimi K3, demand grew so intense that Moonshot temporarily paused new subscriptions to protect computing power for existing users.“We’re adding capacity as fast as we can and will reopen new subscription spots in batches,” the company wrote in a LinkedIn post at the time.Meanwhile, the Financial Times reported last week that Nvidia has instructed cloud providers selling access to its chips that at least 51% of their services must go to non-Chinese customers. Responding to those reports, an Nvidia spokesperson said: “America cannot win the AI race unless America’s AI infrastructure wins worldwide — if the world’s clouds rely on foreign-made chips, the model and application layers will be foreign-built as well.”