Moonshot has Nvidia chip cluster from Alibaba computing deal: Bloomberg News reports

Chinese AI firm Moonshot has secured a computing agreement with Alibaba Group that grants it access to approximately 20,000 Nvidia chips for use in training its AI models, Bloomberg News reported on Friday. The news outlet's sources, familiar with the matter, revealed that Alibaba, a significant investor in Moonshot, anticipates its portfolio companies to leverage Alibaba's cloud services for their computing needs.

Alibaba provides a key portion of the computing power behind Moonshot's Kimi models, with the 20,000 Nvidia chips forming a substantial component of this infrastructure. Moonshot recently unveiled Kimi K3, an AI system boasting 2.8 trillion parameters and edging out Anthropic's frontier Fable model in performance. The U.S. export controls on advanced Nvidia chips, however, have posed significant challenges for Chinese companies in accessing computing power.

Moonshot can tap into Nvidia's newer Blackwell processors, located in Southeast Asia, and is actively seeking additional chips to train its next AI model, according to Bloomberg. These chips are from Nvidia's earlier Hopper generation, which has been widely used across the AI industry for model training and deployment prior to the rollout of the Blackwell lineup.

A spokesperson for Alibaba denied to Bloomberg that the company offers H200-powered computing services to Moonshot. Moonshot's Kimi model has outperformed Alibaba's Qwen on key performance metrics despite both models having similar training resources, reportedly disappointing some employees at Alibaba.

The report from Bloomberg has garnered attention as Moonshot faces increasing scrutiny from U.S. officials. The U.S. government has information suggesting that Moonshot may have distilled Anthropic's Claude Fable 5 model to develop Kimi K3, according to the White House's top tech adviser, Michael Kratsios, who stated this last week.