China's Moonshot reportedly seeking access to more Nvidia Blackwell chips, flagged by Trump administration official as a potential export control breach.

Chinese artificial intelligence startup Moonshot AI is seeking access to additional Nvidia Blackwell chips to develop its next-generation Kimi K4 model, according to The Information, which cited people familiar with the matter.

Moonshot trained its recently launched Kimi K3 model—a 2.8 trillion-parameter system—using Nvidia's advanced Blackwell GPUs despite U.S. export restrictions designed to prevent Chinese companies from accessing the technology. The startup is now working to secure more Blackwell capacity for K4, underscoring its continued dependence on Nvidia's cutting-edge hardware for training frontier AI models.

Because no single Chinese cloud provider could supply sufficient Blackwell chips, Moonshot sourced computing capacity from at least two separate providers. Engineers optimized networking across the data centers to improve GPU communication during training.

For model deployment, Moonshot relies heavily on Nvidia's H20 chips to run Kimi K3 on its platform. The startup recommends customers hosting the model connect at least 64 server chips. Demand has been so strong that Moonshot stopped accepting new subscriptions within 48 hours of K3's launch due to GPU capacity constraints.

Beijing has discouraged domestic companies from using H20 chips in favor of locally designed alternatives. However, large AI servers equipped with Chinese processors remain in limited supply, with customers facing delivery wait times of up to six months.

The report follows allegations from Michael Kratsios, Assistant to the President and Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, who claimed last week that Moonshot had acquired Nvidia GB300-equipped servers and accessed GB300 systems in Thailand to train its models, circumventing U.S. export controls. Kratsios also alleged that Moonshot developed a sophisticated platform to access U.S. AI models while avoiding detection and conducted large-scale distillation of Anthropic's models to develop Kimi K3. While acknowledging that legitimate distillation creates smaller, more efficient models, Kratsios stated that "large-scale, covert industrial distillation aimed at stealing proprietary U.S. technology and undermining American research is unacceptable."