July 31 (Reuters) – Chinese AI firm Moonshot has a computing agreement with Alibaba Group for the use of about 20,000 Nvidia chips, Bloomberg News reported on Friday, citing people familiar with the matter.
Alibaba, one of Moonshot’s largest investors, expects portfolio companies to use its cloud, the report said. The Nvidia chip cluster Alibaba provides accounts for a key portion of the computing power behind Moonshot’s Kimi models, it added.
Moonshot earlier this month unveiled Kimi K3, a 2.8-trillion-parameter model. It said Kimi K3 was the world’s largest open-weight AI system and delivered performance approaching U.S. giant Anthropic’s frontier Fable model.
U.S. export controls on advanced Nvidia chips have made access to computing power a key constraint for Chinese companies.
Moonshot can access Nvidia’s newer Blackwell processors through Southeast Asia and is seeking additional chips to train its next AI model, Bloomberg reported.
Separately, the roughly 20,000 Nvidia chips Moonshot has access to are from the chip giant’s earlier Hopper generation, the report said.
Before Nvidia rolled out its Blackwell lineup, Hopper chips were used across the AI industry to train and deploy models.
An Alibaba spokesperson denied to Bloomberg that the company provides H200-powered computing services to Moonshot.
Moonshot’s Kimi model surpassed Alibaba’s Qwen on key performance measures despite access to similar training resources, disappointing some Alibaba employees, the report said.
Reuters could not independently confirm the report. Moonshot and Alibaba could not be reached for comment outside regular business hours.
The White House, the U.S. Commerce Department and Nvidia did not immediately respond to Reuters’ requests for comment.
The report comes as Moonshot faces growing scrutiny from U.S. officials. The U.S. government had information indicating Moonshot distilled Anthropic’s Claude Fable 5 model to develop Kimi K3, the White House’s top tech adviser, Michael Kratsios, said last week.
(Reporting by Anhata Rooprai in Bengaluru; Editing by Shreya Biswas)
