Alibaba provides Moonshot with computing power of 20,000 Nvidia chips for Kimi model training

Bloomberg has learned that Chinese internet giant Alibaba has agreed to provide AI startup Moonshot with a computing cluster containing 20,000 Nvidia chips of the Hopper generation, specifically H200 accelerators, which are architecturally inferior to the previously discussed Blackwell family. This rented cluster constitutes the main part of the computing power Moonshot can use to train its Kimi AI models. The cooperation is unsurprising given that Alibaba is one of the largest investors in Moonshot and traditionally offers computing capacity for rent to companies it financially supports. Alibaba representatives denied supplying Nvidia H200 chips to Moonshot but did not dispute that the number of some Nvidia chips reached 20,000. The success of Kimi models, which compete with Alibaba's own Qwen family, has disappointed some Alibaba executives, as the company effectively fostered a serious competitor. US officials believe that access to Nvidia Blackwell accelerators is available not only to Moonshot but also to DeepSeek, possibly through rental from a company based in Thailand. Moreover, US officials suspect Moonshot used distillation of Anthropic's advanced model Fable to train Kimi K3, achieving impressive results with limited resources. US laws do not prohibit Chinese developers from renting computing power with advanced Nvidia chips outside China but do not allow them to purchase such chips. Official shipments of Nvidia H200 accelerators to China remain insignificant.