Alibaba Fuels Moonshot AI's Ambitions with 20,000 Nvidia Chips

Alibaba's Hong Kong-listed shares surged 7% in morning trade on August 3 after reports emerged of a computing power agreement between the e-commerce giant and Chinese AI startup Moonshot AI.

The partnership grants Moonshot AI access to a cluster of approximately 20,000 Nvidia Hopper-architecture chips, with the hardware accounting for a significant portion of the computing power needed to train and run Moonshot AI's Kimi series models.

Moonshot AI recently completed a Series F funding round of more than $3.5 billion at a valuation of $35 billion, with Alibaba participating in every funding round since Series B+, investing a total of $800 million.

The report noted that Alibaba typically encourages AI companies it invests in to use its cloud services, but the strong performance of Moonshot AI's Kimi models under comparable computing conditions could also intensify competition with Alibaba's in-house Qwen models.