CNBC reported on Thursday, citing four people familiar with the matter, that Moonshot AI, the Beijing lab behind the Kimi models, discussed this year renting capacity powered by Nvidia’s Blackwell systems from neocloud operators in Europe, mainly for inference, with one source also aware of interest in training clusters, and that talks covered clusters of 8,000 or more GPUs. One source said it had been proposed that Moonshot pay 30 to 50 percent more upfront than a non-Chinese customer, because providers and their lenders want protection against a possible future ban on remote access arrangements. US export controls effectively bar Blackwell chips from being shipped to China, but current law does not give regulators broad authority over access to the chips through cloud services hosted overseas; the Remote Access Security Act, which would extend controls to that access, passed the House in January and has not passed the Senate, and the White House said in July that Moonshot had accessed Blackwell chips through a facility in Thailand.
Moonshot sought Nvidia Blackwell capacity in Europe, CNBC reports
CNBC reported on Thursday that Beijing-based Moonshot AI discussed renting Nvidia Blackwell capacity from European cloud providers this year, including clusters of 8,000 or more GPUs, in talks that no source said had produced a completed deal.
Why it matters: US controls bar Blackwell shipments to China but do not reach remote access through overseas data centres, so a European lease would test the gap in the controls that Congress has moved to close and Washington has already accused Moonshot of using in Thailand.
Data as of CNBC report of November 5, 2026, read in full via the live browser in this run after the text fetch was blocked. Single-sourced to CNBC's four unnamed people familiar with the talks; Moonshot, Nvidia, the White House, the Commerce Department and China's foreign ministry did not respond to CNBC, and no completed deal is reported. Developing item.