Moonshot AI, the Beijing company behind the Kimi chatbot, discussed renting Nvidia Blackwell computing capacity in European data centers, according to a Nov. 5 CNBC report summarized by Tom’s Hardware and Investing.com. The talks reportedly involved clusters of at least 8,000 chips, mainly for running models for users. Moonshot also asked about capacity for training models, the accounts said.
The accounts gave no confirmed lease, agreed price or start date. SnowRock reviewed both outlets’ accounts of CNBC’s reporting. CNBC’s original page was unavailable during the review.
In July, days after releasing Kimi K3, Moonshot said demand had brought it close to the limits of its computing capacity. The company paused new subscriptions and gave existing members priority.
A cloud lease can leave the chips in Europe
A cloud provider can keep chips in its own data center while customers send computing jobs over a network. In May, the U.S. Commerce Department said exports of certain advanced chips to companies headquartered in China, or whose ultimate parent company is headquartered there, still require a license even when the chips go to another country.
The U.S. House passed the Remote Access Security Act 369 to 22 on Jan. 12. The bill would let the commerce secretary restrict some remote access to controlled technology, including through cloud services, if its use could pose a serious risk to U.S. national security or foreign policy. The Senate referred the bill to its Banking Committee the next day.
