European neoclouds hosting Blackwell clusters face a pending U.S. remote-access bill and Nvidia's reported 51% rule for non-Chinese customers, both of which could narrow what Chinese customers can rent.
Chinese AI lab Moonshot AI discussed renting Nvidia Blackwell capacity from cloud companies in Europe this year, CNBC reported on November 5, citing four people familiar with the matter. Blackwell is an Nvidia chip family that U.S. export controls effectively bar from import into China. Renting capacity hosted abroad would let a Chinese lab use such chips without importing them.
CNBC’s report rests on anonymous sources. It does not say a lease was signed or that Moonshot used any European capacity. Moonshot, Nvidia, the White House, the U.S. Commerce Department, the Chinese embassy in the U.K. and China’s Foreign Ministry did not respond to CNBC’s requests for comment.
The report matters because it shows where demand for restricted chips is going once direct shipments are blocked. Investing.com summarized the CNBC story the same day.
The talks involved large Blackwell clusters and a price premium
The four sources told CNBC that Moonshot discussed renting capacity from neoclouds, specialist providers that host Nvidia GPUs, in Europe. Three said the capacity ran on Blackwell systems. Two said Moonshot wanted inference clusters, the machines that serve a trained model to users, and one source was aware of interest in training clusters as well.
One source told CNBC that talks covered renting access to clusters of 8,000 or more Blackwell GPUs hosted in Europe. That source described Moonshot as "very aggressive" in pursuing computing power. Leases of this kind typically involve an upfront payment, set as a share of the contract’s lifetime value, plus payments for capacity. A source said it had been proposed that Moonshot pay 30% to 50% more upfront than a non-Chinese customer would, and CNBC adds that neoclouds and financing firms may favor Chinese customers as a hedge against a future ban on remote access deals.
Moonshot, a Beijing-based lab founded in 2023 that makes the Kimi family of models, has been short of capacity before. In July it released a model that, by its own account, closed the gap with leading systems from Anthropic and OpenAI, CNBC said. Around the Kimi K3 release, Moonshot said, demand stretched its capacity and it temporarily paused new subscriptions, and CNBC quoted a Moonshot LinkedIn post: "We’re adding capacity as fast as we can and will reopen new subscription spots in batches."
Earlier reports tie Moonshot to Blackwell access
The Europe talks follow earlier claims. In July, CNBC said, the White House stated that Moonshot had accessed Blackwell chips through a facility in Thailand. Also in July, Bloomberg Government summarized a report by The Information that Moonshot wanted more Blackwell access to train its next model, Kimi K4, and noted an earlier Bloomberg report that Kimi K3 had been trained on Nvidia chips despite U.S. controls. The summary says the development is likely to add to transatlantic concern about Chinese models closing the gap with OpenAI and Anthropic. The Bloomberg Government page is paywalled, so only that summary was available.
An Nvidia spokesperson gave CNBC a statement on policy: America cannot win the AI race unless its AI infrastructure wins worldwide, and if the world’s clouds rely on foreign-made chips, the model and application layers will be foreign-built too. CNBC does not report that any provider accepted the proposed premium or signed a lease with Moonshot, so the figure shows only what was floated in talks.
U.S. rules are tightening around rented capacity
Two pressures bear on the route. CNBC says the Remote Access Security Act, which would extend export controls to cloud-based access to controlled hardware, passed the House in January but has not passed the Senate. CNBC also noted a Financial Times report that Nvidia told cloud providers they must sell at least 51% of their services to non-Chinese customers. EastFrontier covered that Nvidia instruction on November 4.
CNBC also noted that Nvidia said in August that Washington had licensed some sales of its older H200 chips, but that China’s government restricted such sales.
The next signals are concrete: whether the Senate takes up the Remote Access Security Act, whether any European provider confirms or denies dealings with Chinese customers, and whether Moonshot comments on its sourcing of computing power.