Moonshot Secures Computing Deal with Alibaba for 20K Nvidia Processors
Chinese AI startup Moonshot has secured a computing agreement with Alibaba that grants access to a cluster of around 20,000 Nvidia processors. The substantial computing package underpins Moonshot's Kimi AI models, including the recently unveiled Kimi K3, which made waves in the tech industry by rivaling top-tier offerings from Western pioneers like OpenAI and Anthropic on key benchmark metrics.
The arrangement highlights how top Chinese tech contenders remain deeply dependent on advanced Western semiconductors to fuel their artificial intelligence development, even as trade tensions and export controls between Washington and Beijing continue to intensify. Alibaba, one of Moonshot's primary financial backers, routinely expects its portfolio companies to utilize its cloud infrastructure.
However, the alliance has created internal friction. Using Alibaba's own cloud framework, Moonshot's Kimi models have outperformed Alibaba's in-house Qwen AI products on several performance benchmarks, causing disappointment among some staff members who noted that both development teams had access to comparable training resources.