Filings Show Moonshot AI Rented Nvidia B300 Chips Inside China

Chinese regulatory filings show that Moonshot AI, one of China's leading frontier model developers, secured access to Nvidia's most advanced AI accelerators on Chinese soil this summer — an arrangement that appears to circumvent U.S. export controls.

Two financing contracts, signed August 4 and submitted to the People's Bank of China credit database on August 6, detail a 200 million yuan ($30 million) loan from Beijing Zhongguancun Bank to Lingmeixin (Beijing) Technology Co. The collateral is telling: 32 Super Micro servers equipped with Nvidia B300 GPUs, valued at 432 million yuan ($64.8 million), plus 345.6 million yuan in expected earnings from a compute service contract with Beijing Dark Side of the Moon Technology Co. — Moonshot's main operating entity.

The contracts list the servers as stored in Qingyang, a city in western China designated as a national computing hub. Lingmeixin's attached statement said the hardware was "designated for fulfilling a service contract with Moonshot" and that "Moonshot AI only has right to use the compute service, with no ownership of the equipment." Compute rental, not chip ownership — that's the structure at the center of this story.

What did Moonshot say when asked?

After Bloomberg requested comment on November 3, the database entries were altered to remove references to Moonshot.

The company told Bloomberg: "We neither participated in nor authorized the related financing or guarantee arrangements, and had no knowledge of them." Moonshot added it has "no business relationship with Lingmeixin."

Nvidia and Super Micro moved fast to distance themselves. An Nvidia spokesperson said the entities behind the purchase "are not Nvidia customers" and that the company does "not provide replacement products, service, or support to them." Super Micro said it does not conduct business with these entities and stated it is committed to complying with all applicable U.S. export and re-export control laws and regulations.

Neither statement addressed how the servers reached China. The contracts show Lingmeixin purchased the servers from a newly created subsidiary of Beijing Chunju Technology Co., an e-commerce firm that recently expanded into AI. Chunju did not respond to requests for comment.

Has the White House flagged Moonshot before?

Yes — and recently. In July, after Moonshot released its Kimi K3 model, which the company said narrowed the gap with leading systems from Anthropic and OpenAI, a White House official asserted the startup had obtained use of controlled Nvidia hardware. CNBC reported that the White House said Moonshot accessed Blackwell chips via a facility in Thailand.

CNBC added that Moonshot has since pursued rental deals for Blackwell capacity with "neocloud" operators in Europe. Those talks, per CNBC's sources, involved clusters of 8,000 or more Blackwell GPUs and upfront premiums of 30–50% for Chinese offtakers.

The legal backdrop matters here. U.S. export rules bar shipment of Nvidia's most advanced chips to China without an explicit license. Bloomberg said it could not determine whether one was granted for this transaction. And current law does not give regulators broad authority to control cloud-based access to those chips from overseas data centers — a gap that rental arrangements appear designed to exploit.

Is this a one-off?

No. Chinese filings have exposed similar arrangements before. Semi-Tech Leasing Group, a government-linked financing company, previously documented purchases of servers carrying restricted Nvidia chips — including 32 Asustek servers with B300 GPUs deployed in a China Mobile data center in Ningxia. Semi-Tech later replaced its filings with redacted versions that removed model designations, supplier names and locations.

The scale is hard to dismiss. Research firm SemiAnalysis estimates hundreds of thousands of AI chips have entered China despite controls, citing supply-chain checks and production-installation gaps.

The pricing in the August contracts adds its own signal. The deal implies a per-server price of 13.5 million yuan ($2 million) — roughly a 350% markup over U.S. list prices. That premium is consistent with a constrained, gray-market supply chain.

What remains unclear?

Several questions stay open, and none of the parties involved answered them:

• Whether a U.S. export license was obtained for the B300 shipment.
• How Beijing Chunju Technology acquired the Super Micro servers.
• Whether the Qingyang deployment is operational and, if so, what workloads it runs.
• The full extent of Moonshot's European cloud negotiations.

Moonshot, Lingmeixin and Beijing Zhongguancun Bank did not respond to follow-up questions from Bloomberg or CNBC.

Until Washington closes the cloud-rental loophole — or clarifies whether a license covered this shipment — filings like these will keep doing the work that export controls can't.