Chinese AI startup Moonshot AI is in the market for more Nvidia Blackwell-generation chips, and the reason is straightforward: it wants to train Kimi K4, the follow-up to a model that is already one of the largest open-weight systems ever released.
What Kimi K3 already is, and why K4 is a bigger ask
Moonshot released Kimi K3 on July 22, 2026. The model carries 2.8 trillion parameters and a 1-million-token context window, putting it in a category with very few peers globally.
Kimi K3 was built using Nvidia Blackwell chips, which is itself notable given that the United States has imposed strict export restrictions limiting China’s access to advanced semiconductors.
On July 23, 2026, Michael Kratsios, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, publicly accused Moonshot AI of accessing compute resources through servers located in Thailand. The allegation is that this arrangement was used to distill and replicate U.S. models, including Anthropic’s Fable, effectively circumventing export controls through geographic workarounds.
