A booth for Chinese AI Startup Moonshot’s Kimi K3 during the World AI Conference in Shanghai
Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) startup Moonshot AI is reportedly in preliminary negotiations with American technology giants Microsoft, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google Cloud to establish revenue-sharing partnerships for hosting its frontier Kimi K3 model.
This is the same AI model that the White House accused the startup of using stolen Anthropic technology to build – the very model that knocked down tech stocks earlier this year.
As Kimi K3 features a massive 2.8-trillion-parameter open-weight architecture, few corporate clients can absorb the immense computational hardware costs required to run the model on private on-premise servers, making public cloud distribution vital for widespread enterprise adoption. In benchmark testing by Arena.ai, Kimi K3 ranked first in web interface creation, while evaluation platform Artificial Analysis reported that the system performs on par with OpenAI’s GPT-5.5 and Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.8 in executing intricate, multi-step problem solving. Get the latest technology news and updates. Download the TOI App.
Moonshot is seeking up to a 30% share of proceeds generated from Kimi K3 deployments hosted on Microsoft Azure, AWS and Google Cloud, matching the commercial terms it proposes to major enterprise clients, according to the report. Citing people familiar with the discussions, news agency Reuters reported that the talks reflect rising Western demand for top-performing Chinese machine learning systems, which frequently provide competitive performance at significantly lower price points than Western counterparts.
Reuters says that its sources note that discussions remain in early phases without guaranteed outcomes, with negotiators working through unresolved questions surrounding data access permissions, token audit protocols and exact revenue splits. If finalised, the arrangements would represent the first significant commercial revenue-sharing pact between a domestic Chinese AI lab and premier US cloud infrastructure providers.