China's Moonshot AI Sought Nvidia Blackwell Capacity in Europe as Nvidia Chips Pile Up in Hong Kong Awaiting Beijing's Approval

Chinese AI lab Moonshot AI, the developer of the Kimi models, held discussions this year to rent Nvidia Blackwell computing capacity from data center operators in Europe, CNBC reported on November 5, 2026, citing four people familiar with the matter. One source said the talks covered clusters of 8,000 or more Blackwell GPUs, and that it had been proposed Moonshot pay 30% to 50% more upfront than a non-Chinese customer would. CNBC did not report a signed lease, and Moonshot did not respond. The approach works because U.S. export controls restrict physical shipments of advanced chips to China but not remote access through overseas clouds; the Remote Access Security Act, which would close that gap, passed the House in January but has not cleared the Senate.

The bottleneck at home is running the other way. Reuters reported in an exclusive the same day that about 600,000 of NVDA's advanced AI chips are stored in Hong Kong because Beijing has withheld approval for large-scale imports of H200 processors. Several large Chinese internet companies have each obtained about 10,000 H200 chips in recent months, one source told Reuters, and an eight-card H200 server was offered for more than 6 million yuan, roughly three times its price a year earlier.

A third constraint is plain supply. Chinese buyers who collectively ordered about 6 million RTX Pro 5500 chips expect to receive only about 1% of them over the next four months, according to a Bloomberg report summarized by Yahoo Finance; that shortfall is attributed to Nvidia's production capacity rather than to regulators. Alibaba (BABA) and Tencent are among the affected buyers.

For Nvidia, the three reports describe different problems: Washington's rules on remote access, Beijing's reluctance to let H200s in, and Nvidia's own capacity. What to watch: Senate action on the Remote Access Security Act, any Chinese import approvals that would release the Hong Kong inventory, and how European neocloud operators respond to scrutiny of Chinese customers.