Summary Moonshot secured access to approximately 20,000 Nvidia Hopper chips through Alibaba’s computing agreement, strengthening Kimi AI model development capacity. Kimi K3 outperformed sever
Moonshot AI has secured access to approximately 20,000 Nvidia Hopper chips through a computing agreement with Alibaba, according to a Bloomberg report shared by Crypto Briefing. The arrangement provides a substantial share of the computing power behind Moonshot’s Kimi artificial intelligence models. Moreover, the deal highlights China’s ongoing reliance on Nvidia hardware despite U.S. export restrictions while intensifying competition among domestic AI developers.
Alibaba remains one of Moonshot’s largest investors and encourages companies within its investment portfolio to use its cloud infrastructure. According to the report, the computing agreement supports both the training and deployment of Moonshot’s Kimi models, including the recently launched Kimi K3.
The partnership has also produced an unexpected competitive outcome. According to the report, Kimi K3 has outperformed several of Alibaba’s own Qwen models across important industry benchmarks despite both teams operating with comparable computing resources.
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According to the report, Moonshot developed Kimi K3 as a 2.8 trillion-parameter mixture-of-experts model with 104 billion active parameters. Additionally, the model features a context window of one million tokens, enabling it to process significantly larger volumes of information during complex tasks.
Moonshot stated that Kimi K3 delivers strong performance across coding, reasoning, knowledge retrieval, vision, and autonomous agent applications. However, the company acknowledged that the model still trails the most advanced proprietary systems developed by OpenAI and Anthropic.
Besides releasing Kimi K3, Moonshot also published the model’s full weights for public use. Consequently, developers and researchers can freely download and deploy the system. According to the report, the move has renewed comparisons with DeepSeek, whose open-source models challenged assumptions about the computing resources required to compete with leading U.S. AI companies.
Bloomberg reported that multiple sources identified the processors supporting the agreement as Nvidia H200 accelerators. However, Alibaba denied supplying Moonshot specifically with H200-based computing services. Nevertheless, the company did not dispute providing computing capacity backed by approximately 20,000 Nvidia Hopper chips while declining to identify the exact processors involved.
Moonshot has also attracted attention over its reported access to Nvidia’s newer Blackwell processors. According to the report, White House science and technology policy director Michael Kratsios alleged that the company obtained restricted Blackwell chips through a third party operating in Thailand. He also claimed Moonshot used outputs from Anthropic’s Fable model to support Kimi K3’s development through model distillation.
According to the report, a source familiar with Moonshot’s procurement strategy confirmed that the company has a channel for accessing Blackwell computing resources through Southeast Asia. However, it remains unclear whether Moonshot rented computing services hosted outside China or directly purchased restricted hardware.
That distinction remains significant because current export rules generally prohibit direct shipments of advanced processors to Chinese companies. However, those restrictions typically do not prevent firms from renting computing power through overseas data centers. The report also noted that current U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration approved limited H200 export licenses for selected Chinese companies, including Alibaba, although only a small number of processors have reportedly reached China.
Conclusion
According to the report, Moonshot’s computing agreement with Alibaba demonstrates how Chinese AI companies continue expanding access to advanced computing infrastructure despite export restrictions. The arrangement also highlights how overseas cloud services remain an important pathway for obtaining high-performance AI computing resources.
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