Proposed revenue split and significance for a Chinese AI firm
Moonshot AI is in early-stage negotiations with Microsoft Azure, Amazon AWS and Google Cloud on a revenue-sharing arrangement for its Kimi K3 large language model, with the Chinese startup seeking up to a 30% cut of revenue generated from K3-related services on the three cloud platforms, according to three people familiar with the matter. If concluded, the deal would make Moonshot the first Chinese AI company to monetize directly through U.S. cloud platforms, TradingKey reported, citing the same sources. Moonshot AI did not respond to requests for comment; Microsoft, Amazon and Google all declined to comment, a position echoed across TradingKey, Reuters and Storyboard18.
K3's open-and-closed structure behind the paid channel
Kimi K3's architecture helps explain why hyperscaler distribution matters. In July, Moonshot open-sourced the base version of Kimi K3, a model with 2.8 trillion total parameters that 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, according to TradingKey's summary. The more capable reasoning and multimodal versions remain closed-source and are available only via API, a split that underpins the proposed paid arrangement with the hyperscalers rather than the open release.
Open contract terms still being negotiated
Talks remain preliminary and several mechanics are unresolved. People familiar with the discussions said revenue-sharing mechanisms, data access rights and token usage audits have yet to be finalized, Reuters reported. qz.com and Seeking Alpha likewise characterized the talks as exploratory, with no completed term sheet or signing timeline disclosed by any of the seven outlets covering the story on August 26.
U.S. regulatory headwinds against the cloud channel
The proposed deals face a constrained U.S. policy environment. In late July, Michael Kratsios, Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, publicly accused Moonshot of developing Kimi K3 by distilling Anthropic models, TradingKey reported. The U.S. Department of Commerce and Department of the Treasury have also opened investigations into whether Moonshot illicitly obtained restricted chips through overseas channels, and Treasury Secretary Bessent has warned that placement on trade-restriction lists such as the Entity List cannot be ruled out. Whether any agreement can pass U.S. scrutiny therefore remains highly uncertain.
Funding backdrop and the Pre-IPO variable
Moonshot's parallel financing push frames the timing of the cloud talks. The company completed a Series F round of more than $3.5 billion in July at a $35 billion post-money valuation, according to TradingKey. A Pre-IPO round originally slated for August with a $50 billion pre-money valuation remains underway, a detail cited only by TradingKey and not corroborated in the other Reuters-derived reports. Progress on that round, alongside the Commerce and Treasury chip-sourcing probes and any concrete terms emerging from the hyperscaler negotiations, constitutes the next set of verifiable markers for the deal's prospects.
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