By Elena Vasquez

Chinese financing filings show that 32 Super Micro servers carrying restricted Nvidia AI chips, valued at 432 million yuan ($64.8 million), backed a 200 million yuan ($30 million) loan tied to Moonshot AI’s compute contract, although the startup denies authorizing the arrangements.

What do the financing records show?

Bloomberg reviewed two contracts signed Aug. 4 by Lingmeixin (Beijing) Technology Co., which owned the servers, and Beijing Zhongguancun Bank, the financier. Under the agreements, Lingmeixin pledged two assets:

• The filings valued the 32 servers at a combined 432 million yuan ($64.8 million).
• The contracts pledged 345.6 million yuan in earnings from a service contract with Beijing Dark Side of the Moon Technology Co., Moonshot’s main entity.

The server and earnings pledges secured the 200 million yuan ($30 million) bank loan. The contracts listed the servers as stored in Qingyang, in western China.

A statement attached to the contracts identified the hardware as designated for the Moonshot service. It said Moonshot “only has right to use the compute service, with no ownership of the equipment.”

The bank submitted the contracts to a database operated by the credit agency of the People’s Bank of China on Aug. 6. After Bloomberg requested comment on Nov. 3, the database entries no longer mentioned Moonshot. Lingmeixin and the bank did not answer requests for comment.

Did Moonshot authorize the arrangement?

Moonshot disputed the accuracy of the records. In an emailed statement, a spokesperson said: “We neither participated in nor authorized the related financing or guarantee arrangements, and had no knowledge of them.”

The spokesperson also said Moonshot had no business relationship with Lingmeixin, the server owner. The documents describe a compute service for Moonshot, with earnings from that contract pledged alongside the hardware as loan collateral.

Were the chips approved for China?

U.S. rules bar the chips from shipment to China unless Washington has expressly approved the sale. Bloomberg said it could not establish whether such approval existed.

The filings place restricted Nvidia hardware in China and connect its use with Moonshot’s service contract. They do not resolve the separate export-control question, leaving the legality of the deployment unresolved in the documents Bloomberg reviewed.

What did the companies and U.S. officials say?

An Nvidia spokesperson said the companies behind the purchase were not Nvidia customers. A Super Micro spokesperson said the company did not conduct business with those entities.

According to Bloomberg, a White House official asserted that, once Moonshot’s Kimi K3 model came out, the startup had obtained use of controlled Nvidia hardware. CNBC reported that the White House said in July Moonshot had accessed Nvidia’s Blackwell chips through a site in Thailand.

CNBC separately reported that Moonshot had discussed renting capacity from neoclouds hosting Nvidia chips in Europe, citing four unnamed people familiar with the matter. Moonshot did not answer CNBC’s request for comment.

What do comparable filings show?

Chinese filings have exposed similar purchases before. Semi-Tech Leasing Group Co., a Chinese financing company controlled by local government entities, financed server purchases carrying restricted Nvidia chips.

One contract covered 32 Asustek Computer servers with B300 chips, and most were listed as deployed in a China Mobile data center in Ningxia. By the end of June, Semi-Tech replaced its filings with redacted copies, removing server model designations, supplier names and installation locations.

The unresolved issue is whether Washington expressly approved the sale of the restricted Nvidia chips held in servers stored in China.