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

The talks test whether a downloadable model can gain enterprise distribution through managed cloud services while its developer retains a meaningful share of usage economics.

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Moonshot Seeks Up to 30% of K3 Cloud-Service Revenue as Terms Remain Open
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Moonshot AI is negotiating with Microsoft, Amazon, and Google to host Kimi K3 for enterprise customers—and is seeking as much as 30 percent of the revenue from those cloud services. That is a proposed ceiling, not an agreed rate, and the talks are still preliminary. The logic is straightforward. Kimi K3 is an open-weight model that customers can download and modify, but it is enormous: 2.8 trillion total parameters, with 104 billion activated for each token, plus a one-million-token context window. Analysts cited in the report say many businesses may not want to pay for the computing infrastructure required to run a model of that scale themselves. Managed access through Azure, AWS, and Google Cloud could therefore give K3 a much broader enterprise route. But the commercial mechanics are unresolved. Moonshot and the cloud providers still need to work out how revenue is divided, what data can be accessed, and how token usage is audited for usage-based billing. Moonshot has reportedly signed smaller-scale arrangements with other cloud platforms, and Chinasoft International disclosed a revenue-sharing deal without revealing its percentage. The opportunity comes amid U.S. scrutiny, including possible trade-blacklist action and allegations involving Anthropic’s Fable model and Nvidia chips—claims Moonshot disputes. The immediate constraint is whether the parties can agree on economics and oversight before K3’s infrastructure demands, already blamed for paused subscriptions, limit enterprise availability.

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3 key points

Moonshot AI is exploring agreements that would let Azure, AWS and Google Cloud host Kimi K3 for enterprise customers, with a proposed revenue share of as much as 30%—not an agreed rate. The open-weight model’s 2.8 trillion parameters and 1-million-token context window could make self-hosting expensive, creating demand for managed access. Talks remain preliminary, with revenue allocation, data access and token-usage...

  1. 01

    Kimi K3 has 2.8 trillion total parameters, with 104 billion activated per token.

  2. 02

    The proposed 30% share is a ceiling; negotiations may end without agreements.

  3. 03

    Chinasoft International has disclosed a Moonshot revenue-sharing deal, but not its percentage.

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.

Sources

  1. jpost.comMoonshot AI in talks with Microsoft, Google, Amazon over Kimi K3 revenue split | The Jerusalem Post

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