Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) startup Moonshot AI is said to be using about 20,000 Nvidia chips provided by Alibaba to develop its recently unveiled large-scale AI model, "Kimi K3."
On Aug. 2, Bloomberg reported, citing multiple anonymous sources, that Moonshot and Alibaba have a computing power agreement allowing access to about 20,000 Nvidia GPUs, and that Moonshot is securing a significant portion of the compute resources needed to develop the Kimi series through this deal.
Bloomberg assessed the case as showing that, although China is pushing for semiconductor self-sufficiency, it still heavily relies on U.S.-made semiconductors for cutting-edge AI model development.
According to the sources, Alibaba is among Moonshot's key investors and expects invested corporations to use its cloud infrastructure. However, Alibaba is also developing its own large language model (LLM), "Qwen," putting the two in both a cooperative and competitive relationship. As a result, internal complaints have reportedly been raised about supporting a rival's AI development with the company's own infrastructure.
Kimi K3 is one of the world's largest open-weight (public-weight) AI models with 2.8 trillion parameters. Moonshot says it has outperformed Qwen on some core performance metrics and secured performance competitive with top U.S. AI models.
Kimi K3 has drawn interest from the U.S. government and industry because a Chinese corporation developed a competitive AI model despite U.S. export controls on advanced semiconductors to China. At the same time, it has fueled debate over how massive an investment in GPUs is needed to improve AI performance.
Earlier, Michael Kratsios, Deputy Minister of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), said Moonshot used a third party in Thailand to lease Nvidia Blackwell GPUs for training Kimi K3. This kind of overseas computing power leasing is generally permitted by the U.S. government.
One source said Moonshot has a channel to obtain Blackwell GPUs through Southeast Asia, but declined to comment on the legality of that method.