A White House official says Moonshot accessed Nvidia's chips despite the Chinese export ban

Michael Kratsios, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, said Moonshot acquired Nvidia GB300 equipped servers and accessed GB300 chips in Thailand, likely to train its AI models, according to CNBC. The chips in question belong to Nvidia's Blackwell generation, specifically the GB300 platform, which US export controls explicitly bar from being sold to Chinese companies, making the accusation a direct claim of export control evasion rather than a more general complaint about Chinese AI capability. Moonshot unveiled Kimi K3 on July 16, a model that closed much of the performance gap with frontier systems including Anthropic's Fable 5 and OpenAI's GPT 5.6 Sol, and even surpassed them on several individual benchmarks, a result that prompted immediate scrutiny in Washington over how a Chinese lab operating under chip export restrictions could train a model of that capability. The claim adds a second, distinct thread of accusation against Moonshot beyond the separate allegation that Kimi K3 was built partly through unauthorized distillation of Anthropic's Fable model, meaning the company now faces scrutiny on both how it obtained the compute to train the model and how it may have used a rival's outputs during training. Nvidia has not commented on how GB300 hardware may have reached Thailand or whether the company has visibility into how customers in the region ultimately use hardware once it is sold and shipped through authorized channels.