Moonshot sought Blackwell clusters in Europe after US curbs blocked them in China
CNBC says the Beijing lab discussed renting Blackwell clusters from European neoclouds in 2026, but no signed lease or actual use was reported.
By RuntimeWire Staff · Published · Updated
Primary source: CNBC
Why it matters
The talks test whether U.S. chip controls can hold when the product being sold is remote compute time rather than a shipped GPU. If a Beijing lab can rent Blackwell clusters through European operators, Washington's control point shifts from ports to cloud contracts, and every neocloud leasing to Chinese AI firms becomes part of enforcement. For Moonshot, access to inference and training capacity abroad would directly affect how fast Kimi can serve users and train its next model against U.S. rivals.
Yang Zhilin built Moonshot AI into one of China's leading model labs from Beijing, and the constraint now shaping the company is plain: it needs more high-end compute than U.S. export controls allow it to import. CNBC reported on November 5th that Moonshot discussed renting Nvidia Blackwell capacity from neocloud operators in Europe during 2026, citing four people familiar with the private talks. Three of those sources described the sought capacity as Blackwell-powered.…
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