Moonshot AI Said in Talks With Microsoft, Amazon, Google on Kimi K3 Revenue Sharing, Seeking Up to 30% Cut

TradingKey - On August 26, Eastern Time, Reuters reported, citing three people familiar with the matter, that Chinese AI startup Moonshot AI is in talks with Microsoft (MSFT) Azure, Amazon (AMZN) AWS, and Google (GOOGL) Cloud regarding a revenue-sharing agreement for its Kimi K3 large model.

[Source: Reuters]

Sources said Moonshot AI is seeking up to a 30% cut of the revenue generated from K3-related services on the three major cloud platforms. However, negotiations remain in their early stages, with numerous details yet to be finalized on specific terms such as revenue-sharing mechanisms, data access rights, and token usage audits. Moonshot AI has not responded to requests for comment, while Microsoft, Amazon, and Google all declined to comment.

In July this year, Moonshot AI open-sourced the base version of the Kimi K3 model, which features 2.8 trillion total parameters, making it the world's largest open-source large model by parameter count. The model natively supports visual understanding and features a 1-million-token context window, ranking among the world's top tier in benchmarks such as coding and multimodal understanding. However, the more powerful reasoning and multimodal versions of Kimi K3 remain closed-source and are available only via API.

The negotiations come against the backdrop of ongoing US restrictions on advanced AI chip exports to China. In late July, Michael Kratsios, Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, publicly accused Moonshot AI of developing Kimi K3 by "distilling" Anthropic models.

Meanwhile, the US Department of Commerce and Department of the Treasury have also launched investigations into whether the company illicitly obtained restricted chips through overseas channels. In response, officials including US Treasury Secretary Bessent issued explicit warnings that the possibility of placing it on trade restriction lists such as the Entity List in the future cannot be ruled out.

On the financing front, Moonshot AI completed a Series F funding round of over $3.5 billion in July, reaching a post-money valuation of $35 billion. A Pre-IPO round (Series G), originally scheduled for launch in August with a pre-money valuation of $50 billion, remains underway.

If the revenue-sharing agreement with the three major cloud giants is finalized, Moonshot AI will become the first Chinese AI company to generate revenue directly through US cloud platforms. However, given the current regulatory environment, whether the deal can pass US scrutiny remains highly uncertain.