Moonshot partners with Alibaba to access 20,000 Nvidia chips as AI arms race heats up

Beijing-based AI startup Moonshot AI has locked in a deal with Alibaba Group to access roughly 20,000 Nvidia H200 chips, giving the company the kind of computing firepower typically reserved for the largest labs on the planet. The arrangement underscores just how aggressively Chinese AI companies are scaling up, even as Washington tries to keep the most advanced semiconductors out of their hands. The GPU cluster is being used to train and run Moonshot’s Kimi K3 model, which launched around July 17 with up to 2.8 trillion parameters. For context, that puts it in the same weight class as the frontier models coming out of OpenAI and Anthropic, the companies that have dominated the global AI conversation for the past two years. The Alibaba connection runs deep This isn’t a casual cloud computing contract. Alibaba holds approximately 36% of Moonshot AI, making it far more than a vendor. It’s the company’s largest strategic backer and, through this chip-sharing arrangement, the critical infrastructure provider keeping Kimi’s models running. That ownership stake also means Alibaba has significant skin in the game when it comes to Moonshot’s trajectory. The startup’s valuation has climbed ...