Alibaba computing deal gives Moonshot access to Nvidia chip cluster

Chinese AI startup Moonshot AI relies on a major cloud computing agreement with Alibaba Group that provides access to a cluster of roughly 20,000 Nvidia chips.

As reported by Bloomberg News on Friday, Alibaba, one of Moonshot's largest investors, expects portfolio companies to use its cloud.

The report said, the estimated 20,000 Nvidia chips Moonshot has access to are from the chip giant's earlier Hopper generation.

The Hopper-generation Nvidia chip cluster forms the backbone of the computing power used to train Moonshot's flagship Kimi K3 model, the world's largest open-weight AI system with 2.8 trillion parameters, whose performance approaches Anthropic's frontier models.

U.S. export controls on advanced Nvidia chips have made computing power a key constraint for Chinese AI companies, increasing reliance on domestic cloud providers such as Alibaba.

Moonshot can access Nvidia's newer Blackwell processors through Southeast Asia and is seeking additional chips to train its next AI model.