Key facts
- Moonshot AI is in talks with Microsoft, Amazon, and Google for revenue-sharing agreements.
- The agreements would enable U.S. cloud providers to host Moonshot's Kimi K3 AI model.
- Moonshot is seeking a revenue share of up to 30% from K3-related services.
- Kimi K3 has demonstrated performance comparable to leading Western AI models in third-party evaluations.
- Moonshot, founded in 2023, is backed by major Chinese tech firms and is preparing for an IPO.
China's AI startup Moonshot AI is reportedly in early-stage negotiations with U.S. tech giants Microsoft, Amazon, and Google to host its Kimi K3 large language model on their cloud infrastructure. The company is seeking a revenue share of up to 30% from services powered by K3, a move that could represent a significant revenue-sharing pact between a Chinese AI firm and major U.S. cloud providers.
These discussions underscore the growing influence of Chinese AI models, which are often priced competitively against Western alternatives, in the U.S. market. This is occurring despite U.S. national security concerns that have led to restrictions on AI chip exports to China and critical comments from U.S. officials about Moonshot AI. The startup has faced accusations of intellectual property theft from Anthropic and illegal acquisition of Nvidia chips, which Moonshot has denied.
Key issues remain unresolved in the talks, including the specifics of revenue splitting, data access, and the auditing of token usage, which is crucial for usage-based billing. Kimi K3 has garnered attention for its strong performance in third-party benchmarks, with some evaluations suggesting its capabilities are comparable to advanced models like OpenAI's GPT-5.5 and Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.8.
For AI model providers like Moonshot, major cloud platforms are essential for enterprise adoption, as running a model with 2.8 trillion parameters independently is prohibitively expensive for most customers. Moonshot has already established similar agreements with smaller cloud platforms and, in July, announced a revenue-sharing deal with Chinese IT services provider Chinasoft International. Founded in 2023 by AI researcher Yang Zhilin, Moonshot is backed by several Chinese tech giants, including Alibaba, and is reportedly preparing for a potential Hong Kong listing after raising over $2 billion in May.