From the article:

> A person familiar with Moonshot’s procurement strategy confirmed that the company does indeed have a channel for accessing Blackwell processors via Southeast Asia. They didn’t specify whether this was a rental channel — which is legal, in most cases — or direct purchases, which are a breach of US regulations. The Information reported this week that Moonshot is seeking additional Blackwell processors to train its next model.

> The 20,000 chips Moonshot accesses via Alibaba, meanwhile, are from Nvidia’s earlier generation of Hopper products, the people familiar with the agreement said.

So the 20k GPUs from Alibaba is only a lower bound on how many you need to train a model like Kimi K3.

The advantage of having more GPUs in any case is not so much that you can train bigger models, but that the turnaround time is faster, so you can run more experiments to dial in training choices. It's entirely possible that Musk has more than enough compute, but can't hire the talent to run all those experiments. (That would also explain why he has excess capacity he can rent to Google.)