TL;DRMoonshot trained Kimi K3 on 20,000 Nvidia chips from Alibaba’s cloud. Sources say H200s. Alibaba denies the chip type but not the deal. Kimi now beats Alibaba’s own Qwen models. Moonshot also accessed Blackwells via Thailand.
Moonshot trained Kimi K3 on a 20,000-chip Nvidia cluster supplied by Alibaba, Bloomberg reported on Thursday. The chips form a substantial portion of Moonshot’s total compute capacity. Multiple sources said the agreement is specifically for H200 processors, Nvidia’s most powerful Hopper-generation accelerators. Alibaba denied providing H200s but did not deny the 20,000-chip arrangement and declined to say which chips are involved instead.
The dynamic is extraordinary. Alibaba is one of Moonshot’s largest investors and expects backed companies to use its cloud. But Kimi K3, trained on Alibaba’s infrastructure, now outperforms Alibaba’s own Qwen models on key benchmarks. Bloomberg reported that some people inside Alibaba are disappointed that a rival team with access to similar resources produced a better model than their own. Kimi K3 launched as the world’s largest open-weight model at 2.8 trillion parameters, matching Anthropic’s Fable 5 and OpenAI’s GPT-5.6 on several metrics.
