중국 AI 연구소 Moonshot이 Nvidia 칩에 접근하기 위해 유럽 데이터센터를 검토한 것으로 전해졌으며, Nvidia Blackwell GPU 최소 8,000개를 임차하는 데 관심을 보이고 있다.

Moonshot AI, the Chinese lab behind Kimi, is reportedly looking to Europe to gain access to Nvidia's latest Blackwell AI GPUs. According to CNBC, the company is in talks with at least one European data center to lease clusters with 8,000 or more GPUs for inferencing, and it is also interested in securing compute capacity for training.

While Chinese companies are banned from acquiring Nvidia Blackwell and other AI GPUs that offer the same or better performance and contain U.S. technologies, a loophole has so far allowed them to gain access to compute by renting it from data centers abroad. The U.S. House is attempting to close the gap and has passed the Remote Access Security Act, but the bill must still go through the Senate and the White House before it can become law. In the meantime, Chinese AI labs are exploiting the loophole and training their models on foreign data centers that have acquired Nvidia chips.

The U.S. and China have been locked in an AI arms race, with China's open-weight models trailing frontier U.S. models by only a matter of months. More importantly, models like Kimi K3 are significantly easier to run and could be much cheaper to use. These advances have come despite Washington's efforts to make it harder for Chinese AI labs to acquire hardware that uses American technologies through export bans. President Donald Trump eventually reversed course and allowed Nvidia H200 chips to be exported to China, but Beijing has taken steps to protect its domestic AI chip industry by blocking H200 imports at the border. As a result, these companies must look elsewhere if they want to access the latest, most powerful AI GPUs to train their models.

Moonshot also has a limited window if it wants to secure compute capacity outside China. Nvidia has reportedly told its data center clients to limit their business and avoid serving more than 49% of their capacity to Chinese customers. This could be a harbinger of things to come, especially as reports like these could draw attention to the bipartisan bill and increase pressure to advance the legislation sooner rather than later.