China's Moonshot AI is in early discussions with Microsoft, Amazon and Google about hosting Kimi K3 on their cloud platforms, seeking up to 30 percent of the revenue those services generate, according to Reuters. It would be the first arrangement of its kind between a Chinese AI company and the major American clouds, and it involves a model that Moonshot released as the world's largest open model, one that rattled markets when it landed.
K3 runs to 2.8 trillion parameters, open in licence but impractical for most organisations to host themselves, because the compute required to serve it is beyond what all but a handful of companies can assemble. Open weights therefore do not remove the need for a cloud provider; they change who the cloud provider is competing with. Moonshot gets distribution it could not build, and the hyperscalers get a model performing well against the American frontier, with Arena.ai ranking K3 first for web tasks.
Most of the deal is still unsettled: the revenue split, data access provisions, and how token usage would be audited are all open. The politics are harder than the accounting. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has suggested adding Moonshot to trade blacklists, and US officials have accused the company of distilling other models and acquiring chips illegally, allegations Moonshot denies. Moonshot is preparing a Hong Kong listing at a 30 billion dollar valuation, and international distribution through the largest clouds would materially change the revenue story it takes to investors.