Moonshot AI Discussed European Capacity Lease With More Than 8,000 Blackwell GPUs

Moonshot AI discussed leasing remote access to European computing capacity powered by Nvidia Blackwell GPUs, including a possible cluster of more than 8,000 chips that cannot be shipped to China under U.S. export controls.

The proposed arrangement involved remote access to computing hosted in Europe. The capacity was sought mainly for inference, or running models for users. One person also said they had heard of interest in a training cluster.

One proposal would have Moonshot pay 30% to 50% more upfront than customers outside China. The added payment was proposed as a way for cloud providers and financing partners to offset the risk that remote access could later be restricted.

Current U.S. export controls do not explicitly extend to remote access to controlled items through overseas cloud services. H.R. 2683, the Remote Access Security Act, would extend the export-control framework to that access. The House passed the bill 369-22 on Jan. 12 and referred it Jan. 13 to the Senate Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee, where it has not advanced.

The European talks followed a July allegation by the White House that Moonshot had accessed Nvidia Blackwell chips through a facility in Thailand.