Moonshot built its Kimi models on about 20,000 Nvidia chips assembled under a computing pact with Alibaba.
The hardware provided a substantial chunk of the overall capacity Moonshot tapped for Kimi, and the Beijing-based startup burst onto the global stage with the debut of Kimi K3, an open-source AI model that competes with leading systems on some benchmarks, Bloomberg reported.
Kimi K3's architecture and scale make it extremely compute‑intensive, requiring many tightly coupled, high‑bandwidth accelerators and terabytes of working memory, which contributed to the rapid exhaustion of available GPU capacity.
China's cloud ecosystem moved quickly to host the model, with major providers offering Day 0 support as Moonshot's open release created intense inference demand.
Moonshot is already seeking more Nvidia Blackwell chips to train and serve its next model, Kimi K4, a push that highlights how frontier Chinese AI development still routes through Nvidia hardware even as domestic chip programs advance.
