Chinese AI lab Moonshot reportedly looked at European data centers to access Nvidia chips, report claims

Chinese AI lab Moonshot reportedly explored using European data centers as a way to obtain access to Nvidia AI chips, according to a report cited by Tom's Hardware. The move would take advantage of a gap in U.S. export restrictions that bars Chinese firms from buying Nvidia Blackwell and other AI GPUs of comparable or greater performance that contain U.S. technologies. Washington currently prohibits direct sales of those chips to Chinese companies, but renting compute capacity from data centers located abroad has remained a way around the ban.

The U.S. House has moved to close that opening by passing the Remote Access Security Act. The bill still needs approval from the Senate and the White House before it becomes law. Until then, Chinese AI labs are continuing to train their models on foreign data centers that have already acquired Nvidia chips, the report states.

The disclosure comes amid a broader AI competition between the U.S. and China. Chinese open-weight models now trail frontier U.S. models by only a few months, and models such as Kimi K3 are considerably easier to run and potentially much cheaper to use, according to the report. Those gains have occurred even as Washington has sought to limit Chinese labs' access to hardware built with American technology through export bans.

Policy on Nvidia exports to China has shifted. President Donald Trump reversed course and allowed Nvidia H200 chips to be exported to China, but Beijing has blocked H200 imports at the border in an effort to protect its domestic AI chip industry. As a result, Chinese companies must look elsewhere to obtain the most powerful AI GPUs for training their models.

Moonshot may face a narrowing window to secure compute capacity outside China. Nvidia has reportedly instructed its data center customers to limit their business with Chinese outfits and to avoid allocating more than 49% of their capacity to them. The report notes that disclosures of this kind could draw attention to the bipartisan Remote Access Security Act and add pressure to move the legislation forward sooner.

For U.S. policymakers, the episode highlights the enforcement question at the center of the export regime: whether controls on chip sales can be circumvented through rented access to hardware housed outside China. The Remote Access Security Act is the legislative vehicle aimed at addressing that scenario, and its path through the Senate and the White House remains pending.

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