Moonshot Seeks Up to 30% of K3 Cloud-Service Revenue as Terms Remain Open

Kimi K3 could gain a managed route into enterprises that do not want to operate the model themselves. Moonshot AI is negotiating with Microsoft, Amazon and Google over hosting arrangements for the model, while seeking up to 30% of revenue from K3-related services sold through their cloud platforms.

Kimi K3 is an open-weight model that can be downloaded and modified. Its technical report lists 2.8 trillion total parameters, of which 104 billion are activated for a given token, plus a one-million-token context window. Analysts cited in the report say many customers are unlikely to self-host a model of that size because of the computing cost.

The discussions are early-stage and may not produce agreements. Revenue allocation, data access and token-usage auditing remain unresolved. Tokens are units of text processed by AI models, and measuring their use is central to calculating charges under usage-based billing.

A smaller-scale commercial precedent

• Moonshot has signed similar agreements with smaller cloud platforms, according to people familiar with the matter.
• Chinasoft International disclosed a revenue-sharing agreement with Moonshot in July, but did not disclose the split.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said he might add Moonshot to a trade blacklist. US officials have also accused the company of using Anthropic’s Fable model and illegally acquiring Nvidia chips. Moonshot rejected the suggestion that Kimi K3’s performance came from distillation, saying its gains came from changes to its underlying architecture.

Moonshot raised more than $2 billion in May and is preparing for a potential Hong Kong listing, according to sources cited in the report. Shortly after K3 launched, it paused new subscriptions, saying its GPUs were under strain. A cloud-hosting agreement would offer a potential path to broader enterprise availability without requiring customers to build their own K3 infrastructure.