Moonshot AI reportedly used smuggled Nvidia chips for Kimi K3

Tom's Hardware reports that China's Moonshot AI used Nvidia Blackwell chips to train its Kimi K3 model, allegedly circumventing both US export controls and Chinese import restrictions to obtain the compute.

Why it matters: If accurate, this is concrete evidence that export controls on advanced AI chips are being actively bypassed, not just theoretically at risk. It comes right after Moonshot open-sourced Kimi K3's weights, meaning a model now freely available may have been trained on chips that reached China through illegal channels — a real test case for US-China chip control enforcement.