Chinese AI startup Moonshot AI is sidestepping U.S. export restrictions by leasing Nvidia Blackwell chips through European neocloud providers, according to sources familiar with the arrangements, CNBC reported. The arrangement allows the Beijing-based startup to train large language models on hardware that U.S. export controls explicitly bar from entering China, with Moonshot essentially renting compute power hosted on European soil rather than smuggling chips or relying on stockpiled inventory. Neoclouds, the emerging class of GPU-as-a-service providers that have proliferated since the generative AI boom, purchase thousands of Nvidia chips and rent them by the hour to developers worldwide, and nothing in current export rules prevents a Chinese company from signing a cloud services contract with a European provider. Nvidia says its Blackwell architecture delivers up to 5x the AI training performance of its predecessor, and supply constraints remain acute as major AI labs compete for allocation. Moonshot AI, known for its Kimi chatbot that competes with ChatGPT in China, has raised hundreds of millions in funding and counts Alibaba among its backers, but U.S. restrictions implemented in October 2023 and tightened multiple times since have made direct purchases of advanced AI chips nearly impossible for Chinese companies. Industry sources suggest multiple Chinese AI labs are exploring similar arrangements, treating neoclouds as a kind of offshore compute haven.