Alibaba Fuels Rival Moonshot with 20k Nvidia-Equivalent Computing Power

Alibaba has provided Moonshot AI with computing capacity equivalent to roughly 20,000 Nvidia chips to aid in building its Kimi artificial intelligence models. The deal includes Nvidia H200 chips, which are targeted at demanding AI training and inference tasks. However, Alibaba denied providing computer capacity specifically powered by H200 chips.

The association between Alibaba and Moonshot is curious, as the two businesses compete in the Chinese AI sector. Alibaba is one of Moonshot's biggest backers, but despite this, Moonshot's latest Kimi model has outperformed Alibaba's Qwen model on some measures while running on Alibaba's infrastructure.

This deal may boost demand for Alibaba's cloud computing services and solidify its position as an AI infrastructure supplier. It also highlights how big internet giants can profit from backing startups that may one day threaten their own products.