US business channel CNBC reported on Thursday 5 November that a Chinese AI lab had tried to gain access to Nvidia’s latest chips in Europe. The report rests on four anonymous sources. Investing.com, Tom’s Hardware and other outlets have repeated CNBC’s report without confirming it themselves.

The sources said Beijing-based Moonshot AI, founded in 2023, had held talks this year about renting capacity from cloud providers that run data centres in Europe. Three of them said Moonshot wanted to lease capacity powered by Blackwell systems. US export controls effectively block imports of these chips into China. CNBC does not say whether any deals have been signed.

Remote access largely falls outside the controls

In such an arrangement, a Chinese company rents compute from a company that can buy the chips legally: a non-Chinese data centre operator or a neocloud, a cloud company that rents out GPU capacity. Current law does not give authorities broad power to intervene in the use of cloud services located abroad, CNBC reported.

Two sources said Moonshot was interested in inference, meaning running models for users. One source also mentioned interest in clusters for training models. A source said the talks covered clusters of at least 8,000 Blackwell GPUs and described Moonshot as a ‘very aggressive’ buyer of computing power. Tom’s Hardware wrote that the 8,000-GPU clusters would be for inference, but CNBC’s report does not link these details.

In July, the White House claimed that Moonshot had remotely used Blackwell chips at a facility in Thailand. Moonshot did not comment on the claim at the time. One of CNBC’s sources said talks in Europe have continued since the claim.

When a customer rents compute, it usually pays part of the contract value upfront. One source said it had been proposed that Moonshot pay 30–50 per cent more upfront than a non-Chinese customer. Cloud providers and financiers use this to protect themselves against a possible ban on remote access, CNBC said.

Moonshot released its Kimi K3 model in July. The company said demand strained its capacity so much that it temporarily suspended new subscriptions.

A bill and Nvidia’s instruction

In January, the US House of Representatives passed the Remote Access Security Act (RASA), which would extend export controls to access through cloud services. The vote was 369–22, The Boston Report said. The bill is with the Senate Banking Committee and is not law.

CNBC said the Financial Times reported on Tuesday that Nvidia has required cloud providers to sell at least 51 per cent of their services to non-Chinese customers. The Boston Report, citing Data Center Dynamics, said the instruction was given verbally and applies to future contracts. Asked about the reports earlier this week, 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.’

In August, Nvidia said Washington had granted licences to sell its older H200 chip, but the Chinese government has restricted the deals. Moonshot, Nvidia, the White House and the US Commerce Department did not respond to CNBC’s requests for comment.