How China's Moonshot AI has access to NVIDIA chips
What's the story
Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) company Moonshot AI has struck a computing deal with Alibaba Group. The agreement involves the use of some 20,000 NVIDIA chips for their models, Bloomberg reported. The move comes as US export controls on advanced NVIDIA chips have made access to computing power a major hurdle for Chinese companies.
Partnership
Alibaba expected to have portfolio companies use its cloud services
Alibaba, one of Moonshot's largest investors, is expected to have its portfolio companies use its cloud services.
The NVIDIA chip cluster provided by Alibaba forms a major part of the computing power behind Moonshot's Kimi models.
Earlier this month, Moonshot unveiled Kimi K3, a 2.8-trillion-parameter model that it claims is the world's largest open-weight AI system and delivers performance approaching Anthropic's frontier Fable model.
Tech access
Moonshot has access to NVIDIA's new Blackwell processors
Moonshot can access NVIDIA's new Blackwell processors via Southeast Asia. The company is also looking for more chips to train its next AI model.
The roughly 20,000 NVIDIA chips in question are from the chip giant's older Hopper generation.
Before the launch of Blackwell, Hopper chips were widely used across the AI industry for training and deploying models.
Performance comparison
Moonshot's Kimi model outperformed Alibaba's Qwen
Despite having access to similar training resources, Moonshot's Kimi model outperformed Alibaba's Qwen on key performance measures.
The news has disappointed some employees at Alibaba. An Alibaba spokesperson denied to Bloomberg that the company provides H200-powered computing services to Moonshot.
The report comes as Moonshot faces increasing scrutiny from US officials.
The White House's top tech adviser Michael Kratsios said last week that the US government had information indicating Moonshot distilled Anthropic's Claude Fable 5 model to develop Kimi K3.