Chinese AI companies face mounting challenges in renting chips overseas: Tencent missed out on a $7 billion major order, and Kimi was required to pay a 50% higher advance payment.

Beating AI Express Insight: Moonshot (Kimi) is seeking NVIDIA Blackwell computing power in Europe. An insider disclosed that the two sides have discussed plans to lease at least 8,000 Blackwell GPUs, primarily for model inference, with training also under consideration. To secure these chips, an additional premium may be required: one leasing proposal states that Moonshot’s advance payment would be 30% to 50% higher than that for non-Chinese clients. European cloud service providers are concerned that the U.S. may block Chinese enterprises’ remote access to advanced chips in the future, so they hope to recoup funds as soon as possible. Recently, U.S. restrictions on Chinese AI companies leasing overseas computing power have been tightening. NVIDIA requires overseas cloud service providers to allocate at least 51% of their services to non-Chinese clients; Oracle, pressured by the Trump administration, also canceled a roughly $7 billion AI computing power leasing contract with Tencent. The U.S. currently bans direct exports of advanced chips like Blackwell to China, but has not fully prohibited Chinese enterprises from leasing overseas computing power. In July this year, the White House accused Moonshot of using Blackwell via a Thai data center. Now, Moonshot is again seeking computing power in Europe, while the U.S. Congress is pushing legislation to further restrict such remote usage.