Moonshot Shops for Nvidia Blackwell in Europe to Dodge US Chip Curbs

Moonshot AI is hunting for Nvidia's Blackwell chips in Europe. The Chinese lab has held talks this year to rent GPU capacity from neoclouds running Nvidia hardware at European facilities, four people familiar with the matter told CNBC. The people spoke on condition of anonymity because the discussions are private.

The scale being floated is serious. One source said talks have covered clusters of 8,000 or more Blackwell GPUs hosted in the region, with Moonshot described as quot;very aggressivequot; in chasing compute. Two sources said the interest centers on inference clusters — the hardware that serves finished models to users — while one said they were also aware of interest in training clusters. To land a deal, Moonshot was said to have been asked for upfront payments 30% to 50% higher than a non-Chinese buyer would pay, a cushion against the risk that Washington someday bans remote access outright.

The timing matters. In July, the White House said Moonshot had tapped Blackwell chips through a facility in Thailand. One source told CNBC the European talks have unfolded since then. US export controls block shipments of Nvidia's most advanced chips into China, but renting them remotely from an overseas data center sits in a gap current law doesn't clearly reach — regulators lack broad authority over cloud access hosted abroad.

Moonshot, founded in Beijing in 2023, is one of China's top model builders and the maker of the Kimi family. Its July release, Kimi K3, was pitched by the company as closing the distance to systems from Anthropic and OpenAI, and it drew users hunting a cheaper alternative to US offerings. Demand ran so hot that Moonshot said capacity was stretched and it paused new subscriptions, promising in a LinkedIn post to reopen spots in batches as it added compute.

Washington is circling. The Remote Access Security Act, which would extend export controls to cloud-based access of critical hardware and software, cleared the House in January and is still waiting on the Senate. The Financial Times reported Tuesday that Nvidia told cloud providers selling access to its chips that at least 51% of services must go to non-Chinese customers. Asked about that, an Nvidia spokesperson said America quot;cannot win the AI race unless America's AI infrastructure wins worldwide.quot; The chipmaker also said in August that Washington had licensed some sales of older H200 chips, only for Beijing to restrict them as it pushes domestic suppliers.

Moonshot, Nvidia, the White House, the Commerce Department, China's embassy in the UK and its Ministry of Foreign Affairs all stayed silent when CNBC asked. With Chinese models spreading fast in 2026 on capability gains and lower prices, more Blackwell access would only sharpen the pressure on US rivals — which is exactly why the Senate fight over remote access is worth watching.