Chinese AI startup Moonshot AI relies on a major cloud computing agreement with Alibaba Group that provides access to a cluster of roughly 20,000 Nvidia chips.
As reported by Bloomberg News on Friday, Alibaba, one of Moonshot’s largest investors, expects portfolio companies to use its cloud.
The report said, the roughly 20,000 Nvidia chips Moonshot has access to are from the chip giant’s earlier Hopper generation.
The Hopper-generation Nvidia chip cluster forms the backbone of the computing power used to train Moonshot’s flagship Kimi K3 model, a 2.8-trillion-parameter open-weight system whose performance approaches Anthropic’s frontier models.
U.S. export controls on advanced Nvidia chips have made access to computing power a key constraint for Chinese companies.
The Nvidia chip cluster Alibaba provides accounts for a key portion of the computing power behind Moonshot’s Kimi models.
Moonshot can access Nvidia’s newer Blackwell processors through Southeast Asia and is seeking additional chips to train its next AI model.
The infrastructure forms the backbone of the computing power used to train Moonshot’s flagship Kimi K3 model—a 2.8-trillion-parameter open-weight system that has drawn global attention for closing the performance gap with Western frontier models like Anthropic
Amid strict U.S. sanctions limiting advanced chip access in China, the arrangement highlights how domestic cloud giants support local startups.
Concurrently, separate reports have spotlighted that Moonshot has sought alternative pathways—such as utilizing newer Nvidia Blackwell processors through Southeast Asian third-party channels—to power its next-generation development
It said Kimi K3 was the world’s largest open-weight AI system and delivered performance approaching U.S. giant Anthropic’s frontier Fable model.
