Beijing-based artificial intelligence lab Moonshot AI held talks in 2026 to rent Nvidia Blackwell GPU capacity from European neoclouds, seeking clusters of 8,000 or more chips primarily for model inference. Remote access via foreign data centers remains legal under U.S. Export Administration Regulations, prompting lawmakers to propose the Remote Access Security Act while Nvidia reportedly instructed partners to allocate at least 51% of new contract services to non-Chinese customers.
Moonshot AI European GPU access
- ▪Beijing-based artificial intelligence lab Moonshot AI held talks in 2026 to rent Nvidia Blackwell GPU capacity from European neocloud operators, including potential clusters of 8,000 or more GPUs
- ▪Moonshot AI sought European data center compute capacity primarily for inference workloads to serve model outputs to users, while also inquiring about clusters for model training
- ▪Moonshot AI's search for European GPU capacity followed a July 19, 2026 announcement in which Moonshot AI stated high demand for its Kimi model was approaching its GPU hardware limits
US export control loopholes
- ▪The U.S. House of Representatives passed the Remote Access Security Act, to grant the Commerce Department explicit licensing authority over foreign cloud access to advanced chips
- ▪White House Office of Science and Technology Policy Director Michael Kratsios alleged in July 2025 that Moonshot AI accessed advanced Nvidia server hardware remotely via a facility in Thailand
- ▪Renting advanced artificial intelligence hardware through foreign cloud data centers is legal under current U.S. Export Administration Regulations managed by the Bureau of Industry and Security
Nvidia 51% customer rule
- ▪Nvidia stated that American artificial intelligence infrastructure must succeed globally to prevent foreign entities from dominating the AI model and application layers
- ▪Nvidia verbally instructed data center partners to direct at least 51% of cloud services on new contracts to non-Chinese customers, according to reporting by the Financial Times on November 3, 2026
Neocloud operator exposure
- ▪European neocloud operators borrow capital against Nvidia GPUs as loan collateral, leaving operators dependent on Nvidia chip allocations and lender risk assessments
- ▪China's National Intelligence Law of June 27, 2017 mandates that Chinese entities cooperate with state intelligence efforts, maintaining regulatory exposure for Moonshot AI regardless of data center location
US-China AI chip competition
- ▪Moonshot AI released its Kimi K3 model in July 2026, a 2.8-trillion-parameter mixture-of-experts system built to compete against artificial intelligence offerings from OpenAI and Anthropic
- ▪Representative Mike Lawler stated that remote cloud access provides the Chinese Communist Party with an effective mechanism to circumvent U.S. hardware export prohibitions
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