Chinese AI companies face growing difficulties renting chips overseas: Tencent lost a $7 billion major order, Kimi required to pay 50% more in advance payments.

Beating AI News Flash: Moonshot AI (Kimi) is seeking NVIDIA Blackwell computing power in Europe. Sources say the two sides discussed renting at least 8,000 Blackwell GPUs, mainly for model inference, with training also under consideration.

Renting these chips may require paying extra upfront. One leasing proposal suggested that Moonshot AI's prepayment be 30% to 50% higher than that of non-Chinese customers. European cloud service providers worry that the U.S. may in the future block channels for Chinese companies to remotely rent advanced chips, so they want to recoup funds as early as possible.

Recently, U.S. restrictions on Chinese AI companies renting overseas computing power have been escalating. NVIDIA requires overseas cloud service providers to allocate at least 51% of their services to non-Chinese customers, and Oracle, under pressure from the Trump administration, canceled an AI computing power leasing contract with Tencent worth about $7 billion.

The U.S. currently bans direct exports of advanced chips such as Blackwell to China, but has not yet comprehensively prohibited Chinese companies from renting overseas computing power. In July this year, the White House alleged that Moonshot AI used Blackwell through a data center in Thailand. Now, Moonshot AI is again seeking computing power in Europe, while the U.S. Congress is pushing legislation to further restrict this remote usage method.