Moonshot AI in talks with Microsoft, Amazon, Google over Kimi K3

Moonshot AI is negotiating revenue-sharing deals with Microsoft, Amazon and Google to host its Kimi K3 model on their cloud platforms, Reuters reported, citing people familiar with the discussions. The Beijing-based startup is asking for as much as 30 percent of what Azure, AWS and Google Cloud earn from K3-related services — a rate the company says matches terms it already offers large enterprise customers of the open-weight model directly.

The talks are described as early-stage, with no certainty they produce agreements. Three issues remain unresolved, according to one source: how the revenue would actually be split, what access to user data each side gets, and how token usage — the basic unit cloud providers bill against — would be audited. If completed, a deal would be the first major revenue-sharing arrangement between a Chinese AI developer and a major US cloud provider, an arrangement that does not currently exist anywhere in the industry.

The negotiations are happening against a hostile political backdrop. US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said last month that he might add Moonshot to a US trade blacklist. Separately, US officials have accused the company of stealing from Fable, Anthropic's most advanced model, to help build Kimi K3, and of illegally acquiring Nvidia chips. Moonshot has denied the distillation claim, telling China's National Business Daily last month that K3's performance gains came from original changes to its underlying architecture rather than copying another company's model.

Kimi K3 itself has drawn attention on technical merit. The roughly 2.8-trillion-parameter mixture-of-experts model, released in mid-July with open weights following two weeks later, has been ranked first on the Arena.ai leaderboard for web-interface-building tasks, and is reported to perform comparably to OpenAI's GPT-5.5 and Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.8 on general benchmarks. Moonshot closed a funding round of about $3.5 billion at a $35 billion valuation shortly after K3's launch — up sharply from the roughly $20 billion valuation it carried in May — and is reportedly preparing to file for a Hong Kong IPO by the end of September, targeting a listing in early 2027.

Moonshot, Microsoft, Google and Amazon all declined to comment to Reuters.

Disclosure: NewUJ's editorial process uses Anthropic's Claude models. This article was written from published reporting and held to the same sourcing standards as any other story on this site.