Borrowing, Copying, and Even Nvidia Chips? The Cunning Tactics Behind China's Most Powerful AI

The Chinese AI model "Kimi K3," which recently shook the U.S. stock market.

Revelations have emerged that the foundation of Moonshot AI, the company behind the model, relied on 20,000 U.S. Nvidia chips.

Bloomberg reported that Moonshot AI has a computing contract with Alibaba involving approximately 20,000 Nvidia chips.

These chips are known to account for a significant portion of the total computing power Moonshot uses to train and operate its Kimi models.

The chips in question belong to Nvidia's previous-generation "Hopper" lineup, with multiple sources pointing specifically to the H200, the most powerful among them.

Selling the H200 to China requires export licenses from the U.S. government, but U.S. officials explain that the actual volume entering the country with proper authorization is extremely small.

Alibaba pushed back, stating, "Claims regarding the supply of the H200 are completely baseless."

However, the company did not deny the fact that it provides 20,000 Nvidia chips, nor did it specify which chips are being supplied.

Alibaba is one of Moonshot's largest investors and has been requiring its portfolio companies to use its cloud services.

The U.S. White House believes Moonshot did not stop there.

On June 22, Michael Kratsios, Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, publicly accused Moonshot of illicitly securing Nvidia's latest Blackwell chips, which are banned from being sold to China.

Blackwell is currently the most powerful AI accelerator in existence.

Kratsios claimed that Moonshot accessed servers equipped with Blackwell chips in Thailand and likely used them to train its AI models.

Suspicion has also been raised that Moonshot copied Anthropic's top-tier model through a "distillation" method.

Last February, Anthropic exposed that Moonshot AI had used fake accounts to generate over 3.4 million queries and responses, engaging in so-called "adversarial distillation" to copy its AI's patterns.

[Voice / Tarun Chhabra, Anthropic Head of National Security : Model distillation is a real problem. I think it is narrowing America's technological edge. Right now, we are blocking millions of accounts every week that facilitate this kind of distillation.]

The Chinese government stated that it opposes politicizing and weaponizing trade and technology issues.

U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent warned that foreign AI models confirmed to be built using technology stolen from U.S. companies could face sanctions.

(Reported by Kim Soo Hyung | Video by Na Hong-hee | Graphics by Lee Jung-joo | Produced by SBS Digital News)
※ Please note: This article was translated by AI and may contain errors.