Thought Leadership
Chinese AI company Moonshot AI is negotiating revenue-sharing agreements with Microsoft, Amazon, and Google, according to a report by Reuters.
The revenue share would allow the three US cloud corporations to offer the Kimi K3 model on their respective platforms. Such a deal would be the first major revenue-sharing agreement between a Chinese AI company and a major US cloud provider. According to three people familiar with the talks, who spoke on condition of anonymity, Moonshot—which is approaching an initial public offering—is demanding up to 30 percent of the revenue that Microsoft’s Azure, Amazon Web Services, and Google Cloud generate with K3-related services.
The talks are reportedly still in an early stage, and an agreement is not guaranteed. Unresolved issues reportedly include the exact revenue split, questions regarding data access, and the technical tracking of actual token consumption. Chinese IT services company Chinasoft International had already announced its own revenue-sharing agreement with Moonshot in July without disclosing financial details.
Kimi K3 is an open-weights model with 2.8 trillion parameters, making it the largest publicly available model of its kind. Although the model weights can be freely downloaded and fine-tuned, running a system of this size independently requires computing capacity that would be difficult to justify for most customers, analysts estimate, giving cloud providers like Microsoft, Amazon, and Google a potential role as infrastructure partners. In independent evaluations, Kimi K3 recently achieved strong results, such as first place in a leaderboard comparison by Arena.ai for web interface creation and, according to Artificial Analysis, results comparable to OpenAI’s GPT-5.5 and Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.8 on complex, multi-step reasoning tasks.
Allegations by US authorities against Moonshot remain unresolved
The talks are taking place despite ongoing criticism of Moonshot from high-ranking US government officials. US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent stated last month that he was considering placing the company on a trade blacklist. US officials also accuse the Beijing-based company of unlawfully relying on outputs from Anthropic’s most advanced model Fable during the development of Kimi K3, as well as illegally procuring Nvidia chips. Moonshot rejected the allegation of such so-called distillation in statements to the Chinese newspaper National Business Daily last month, asserting instead that K3’s performance gains were due to independent modifications to the underlying architecture.
Moonshot was founded in 2023 by Carnegie Mellon University-trained AI researcher Yang Zhilin. The company is backed by Chinese tech giant Alibaba, among others, and has raised more than $2 billion in investment capital to date. Neither Moonshot nor Microsoft, Google, or AWS have commented on press inquiries so far.
(Editorial Team)
