Moonshot Secures Access to 20,000 Nvidia Chips Through Alibaba Deal

Chinese AI firm Moonshot has secured a deal with Alibaba Group to access about 20,000 Nvidia chips. This agreement is part of a larger computing arrangement between the two companies, which expects its portfolio companies to use its cloud services.

Moonshot's Kimi models rely heavily on this computing power, and the company recently unveiled its Kimi K3 model, a 2.8-trillion-parameter AI system that surpassed Alibaba's Qwen in key performance measures despite accessing similar training resources.

The Nvidia chip cluster provided by Alibaba accounts for a significant portion of the computing power behind Moonshot's Kimi models. However, US export controls on advanced Nvidia chips have made access to computing power a constraint for Chinese companies, and Moonshot is seeking additional chips to train its next AI model.