Moonshot AI reportedly trained its new Kimi K3 model using smuggled Nvidia Blackwell chips, evading both U.S. export bans and China's own import restrictions on the hardware.
According to a report citing people with knowledge of the matter, Moonshot worked with two Chinese firms that had Blackwell chips in their datacenters despite the bilateral restrictions. Neither firm reportedly had enough chips on its own, so Moonshot had to link multiple eight-GPU Blackwell servers together across separate datacenters to assemble the compute it needed. A researcher at another major Chinese tech firm told the outlet that Kimi K3 has kicked off a new compute arms race domestically, since homegrown Chinese AI accelerators remain a generation or two behind Nvidia's chips and are stuck in backorder. For inference, Moonshot reportedly leans on Nvidia's China-legal H20 chip instead, though demand has been high enough that new subscriptions are waitlisted.
The bigger story isn't one model - it's the rental loophole. White House official Michael Kratsios has separately and publicly claimed Moonshot obtained GB300 servers and accessed GB300 chips through a facility in Thailand, and buying restricted chips is illegal while renting compute abroad currently isn't - at least until the proposed Remote Access Security Act closes that gap. The U.S. Commerce Department is reportedly investigating whether Chinese firms are accessing advanced chips this way.
None of this is confirmed by Nvidia, Moonshot, or Chinese regulators - it rests entirely on unnamed sources. Still, it fits a pattern already documented elsewhere: Chinese AI firms finding creative workarounds to chip restrictions faster than regulators can close them.