Keeping the upper hand in the AI arms race has become a vital goal for both the U.S. and China, and Nvidia's Blackwell AI chips are one of many flashpoints in that fight. The US government bars their sale to Chinese firms, while Chinese policies block their import as the country tries to spin up an advanced AI chip industry of its own.
But as we've discussed multiple times and then some more, Chinese AI firms are quite creative with workarounds for these restrictive policies. That's the case of Moonshot AI, which has reportedly made good use of Blackwell for training the recently released Kimi K3 frontier-level model, and is seemingly looking to obtain additional access in preparation for Kimi K4.