Chinese artificial intelligence startup Moonshot AI has secured access to approximately 20,000 Nvidia chips through a computing agreement with Alibaba, according to Bloomberg.

The Hopper generation processors represent a significant portion of the computing capacity used to train and operate Moonshot’s Kimi models, including its recently released Kimi K3 system.

Alibaba is one of Moonshot’s largest investors and encourages companies in its portfolio to use its cloud infrastructure. 

The arrangement has also created an unusual competitive dynamic, as Kimi K3 has surpassed Alibaba’s own Qwen models across several important performance benchmarks despite both teams having access to comparable resources.

Moonshot released Kimi K3 earlier this month as a 2.8 trillion parameter mixture of experts model with 104 billion active parameters and a context window of one million tokens.

The company said K3 delivers frontier level performance in coding, reasoning, knowledge, vision, and autonomous agent tasks. Moonshot acknowledged that the model continues to trail the most powerful proprietary systems from OpenAI and Anthropic overall.

The full model weights were released publicly, allowing developers and researchers to download and deploy the system. Its rapid emergence has renewed comparisons with DeepSeek, whose models challenged assumptions about the amount of computing infrastructure required to compete with leading US AI companies.

The Alibaba agreement highlights China’s continued reliance on Nvidia processors despite years of US restrictions intended to limit the country’s access to advanced AI hardware.

People familiar with the deal said the 20,000 processors came from Nvidia’s Hopper generation. Multiple sources identified them as H200 accelerators, although Alibaba denied supplying Moonshot with H200 based computing services.

Alibaba did not deny providing Moonshot with computing capacity supported by approximately 20,000 Nvidia chips and declined to specify which Hopper products were used, according to the report.

The Trump administration reversed part of the US export policy earlier this year by approving licenses for some H200 sales to Chinese companies, including Alibaba. However, a senior Commerce Department official said in July that only a very small number of H200 processors had been shipped to China under those approvals.

Moonshot has also faced scrutiny over its reported access to Nvidia’s newer Blackwell processors.

White House science and technology policy director Michael Kratsios accused the company of acquiring restricted Blackwell chips and accessing additional computing capacity through a third party in Thailand. He also alleged that Moonshot used outputs from Anthropic’s Fable model to help train Kimi K3 through model distillation.

A person familiar with Moonshot’s procurement strategy confirmed to Bloomberg that the company had a channel for accessing Blackwell computing capacity through Southeast Asia.

It remains unclear whether that access involved renting processors located outside China, which is generally permitted under current US rules, or directly purchasing restricted hardware in violation of export controls.

The distinction illustrates a key limitation of the US restrictions. While the rules can prevent certain processors from being shipped directly to Chinese companies, they do not generally prevent those firms from renting access to the same hardware through overseas data centers.

Moonshot’s ability to develop Kimi K3 despite those restrictions is likely to intensify debate over the effectiveness of Washington’s chip controls and the scale of spending by US companies on AI infrastructure.