Chinese AI Firm Moonshot Pursues Hong Kong IPO With Kimi K3 As OpenAI and Anthropic Face Open-Model Pressure Ahead of US Listings

TradingKey - On September 2, Eastern Time, Chinese AI company Moonshot AI initiated its Hong Kong listing process. According to Reuters, the company has confidentially submitted an A1 listing application to the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. The company declined to comment on the market rumors.

Moonshot AI's valuation is climbing rapidly. The company completed a funding round of over $3.5 billion in July this year, reaching a post-money valuation of approximately $35 billion. The round closed early as subscriptions exceeded the original target by more than three times.

While advancing its Hong Kong listing, Moonshot AI is simultaneously conducting its final round of private financing—a Pre-IPO round—targeting a valuation of around $50 billion. The transaction is currently under negotiation and progressing, but has not yet closed. If this round of funding is successfully completed, its valuation will grow by more than 10-fold compared to the end of 2025.

Kimi K3 Is Core Tech Asset, Previously Sought Access to Overseas Cloud Platforms

Moonshot AI's Kimi released its next-generation model, Kimi K3, on July 16. The model adopts a MoE architecture with 2.8 trillion total parameters, and its weights were released in late July. Following its launch, K3 became one of the world's largest open-weights models and the first open-weights model to reach the 3-trillion-parameter scale. Kimi K3 ranked first with a score of 1,679 in Frontend Code Arena, a specific frontend code benchmark, surpassing Claude Fable 5.

On the commercialization front, prior to K3's release, Moonshot AI's commercial performance had already heated up significantly. According to media reports, the company's annual recurring revenue (ARR) grew from over $100 million in March to approximately $300 million in June.

Following K3's launch in mid-July, market demand grew rapidly further. Due to the surge in demand, existing computing power neared its capacity limit within 48 hours after release, prompting Moonshot AI to temporarily suspend new consumer subscriptions and prioritize existing computing power to serve paying users.

In addition, according to a Reuters report on August 26, Moonshot AI is in early-stage negotiations with Microsoft (MSFT), Amazon (AMZN), and Google (GOOGL) regarding cloud hosting and revenue sharing for K3, seeking to receive up to a 30% share of revenue generated by K3-related services on Azure, AWS, and Google Cloud. Currently, negotiations remain in early stages, and no agreement has been signed.

Anthropic and OpenAI Simultaneously Prepare for US IPOs

While Moonshot AI launches its Hong Kong IPO, U.S. AI giants are also advancing their listing plans. According to a report by The Information, Anthropic plans to publicly disclose its IPO prospectus after U.S. Labor Day, with a potential listing window in late September or early October. The company completed a $65 billion Series H funding round in May this year, reaching a post-money valuation of $965 billion. Anthropic's second-quarter revenue reached $11.6 billion, surpassing OpenAI's $6.7 billion over the same period; as of the end of July, its annualized revenue run rate exceeded $65 billion.

OpenAI confidentially submitted its IPO registration documents to the SEC in June this year, targeting a market valuation of approximately $1 trillion, though reports suggest its listing may be delayed until 2027.

Open-Weight Models May Intensify Price Competition

Kimi K3's decision to release open weights means developers can obtain model weights for free and deploy them locally. Compared with closed-source models that rely on API fees, this model may exert certain pricing pressure on OpenAI and Anthropic.

OpenAI launched two open-weight models, gpt-oss-120b and gpt-oss-20b, in August 2025. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei stated in July this year that the company does not advocate a blanket ban on open-weight models, but rather favors more targeted regulation directed at the risks of advanced AI capabilities.

Moonshot AI, Anthropic, and OpenAI successively advancing their IPOs signals that the AI industry is entering a new stage of capitalization competition, with AI companies' valuation battles extending from private markets to public markets.

As the listing process progresses, investor focus will extend beyond fundraising valuations to focus more on revenue quality, growth sustainability, and cash flow conditions.