Moonshot AI Seeks European Chips to Bypass US Bans
Moonshot AI attempted to lease Nvidia Blackwell GPU clusters from European data centers to circumvent United States export controls on advanced artificial intelligence hardware.
Chinese artificial intelligence lab Moonshot AI sought to lease computing capacity from European data centers to access Nvidia Blackwell GPUs, which are currently banned for import into China under United States export controls. The company reportedly pursued clusters of 8,000 or more GPUs for training and inference, offering upfront premiums of 30% to 50% to secure the hardware.
This effort follows accusations from the White House in July that Moonshot AI accessed Blackwell chips through a facility in Thailand. While current U.S. law lacks broad authority to regulate remote cloud access to hardware hosted overseas, the United States House of Representatives passed the Remote Access Security Act in January to close this loophole. The bill is currently awaiting Senate approval.
In response to these evasion tactics, Nvidia Corporation has reportedly instructed cloud providers to ensure at least 51% of their services are sold to non-Chinese customers. This measure aims to limit the ability of Chinese firms to utilize Nvidia infrastructure via third-party cloud providers.
