3rd August 2026 – (Hong Kong) Alibaba Group’s Hong Kong‑listed shares rallied as much as 7% in morning trade after reports that the company has struck a compute agreement with Chinese start‑up Moonshot AI to provide access to a cluster of roughly 20,000 Nvidia Hopper‑architecture chips for training its Kimi models. By 10.35am, the stock was up 6.24% at HK$124.3, with turnover at about HK$9.06 billion. The move added momentum to a broader rise in major internet names on the Hong Kong market.
The report, attributed to people familiar with the matter, suggested the hardware would underpin a significant share of Moonshot’s training capacity. Alibaba rejected suggestions it had supplied Nvidia’s H200 specifically, calling that claim “utter nonsense,” but did not dispute that Moonshot AI was drawing on Nvidia compute through Alibaba’s infrastructure. The parties declined to detail the exact chip models involved.
Moonshot AI has just closed a funding round of more than US$3.5 billion at a US$35 billion valuation, led by China’s National Artificial Intelligence Industry Investment Fund. Alibaba has participated consistently since the company’s Series B+ and now holds an interest estimated at about US$5 billion on paper after investing a cumulative US$800 million, implying an unrealised gain of around US$4.2 billion. The start‑up is reportedly exploring a final pre‑IPO raise that could lift its pre‑money valuation towards US$50 billion.
The partnership highlights the centrality of high‑end Nvidia hardware to China’s model development despite continuing US export restrictions. Market observers said a 20,000‑chip cluster underlines how competition has shifted from algorithms alone to securing compute at scale. They added that cloud providers’ inventories, cross‑border capacity and centralised scheduling may blunt the practical bite of controls, even as rules tighten.
Investor sentiment was also buoyed by Alibaba’s own product cadence. The group unveiled Qwen 3.8‑MAX, an advanced iteration of its flagship model with improvements in reasoning, coding, agentic behaviour and multimodal understanding, while promising lower inference costs. Closer alignment with Moonshot AI deepens Alibaba’s dual role as both strategic investor and cloud backbone for large‑scale AI workloads, even as Moonshot’s Kimi family increasingly competes at the frontier and potentially jostles with Alibaba’s in‑house Qwen line.
