Moonshot AI（月之暗面） is in early-stage talks with Microsoft, Amazon and Alphabet’s Google on potential revenue-sharing agreements that could allow the U.S. cloud providers to host its Kimi K3 model, Reuters reported on Aug. 26, citing three people familiar with the discussions.
Moonshot is seeking up to 30% of revenue from K3-related services offered through Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud, according to the report. The parties have yet to resolve issues including the revenue split, data access and the auditing of token usage. No agreement has been signed, and Moonshot, Microsoft, Google and AWS declined to comment.
If concluded, the arrangement could become a significant revenue-sharing agreement between a Chinese AI company and a major U.S. cloud provider. It would also give Moonshot access to cloud platforms that already serve enterprise customers internationally.
Kimi K3 is an open-weight, 2.8-trillion-parameter model with a one-million-token context window. Arena.ai has ranked it first in a benchmark for web-interface building, while Artificial Analysis said its performance on complex, multi-step tasks was comparable with OpenAI’s GPT-5.5 and Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.8. Those assessments should be read as benchmark-specific, rather than a general measure of production performance.
Although users can download and modify K3, operating a model of its scale requires substantial computing resources. Reuters reported that analysts view cloud distribution as the principal route to enterprise adoption for large-model developers such as Moonshot.
Moonshot has already entered into a token-revenue-sharing and joint-innovation agreement with Chinese IT-services provider Chinasoft International（中软国际）. Chinasoft disclosed the partnership in July but did not disclose the revenue split.
Founded in 2023 by Carnegie Mellon-trained researcher Yang Zhilin, Moonshot is backed by Chinese technology companies including Alibaba. Reuters reported that the company raised more than USD 2 billion in May and is preparing for a potential Hong Kong listing.
The negotiations come amid heightened U.S. scrutiny of Chinese AI developers. Reuters reported that U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said last month that Moonshot could be added to a trade blacklist. U.S. officials have also accused the company of using Anthropic technology and illegally acquired Nvidia chips in developing K3; Moonshot has rejected claims that its model’s performance resulted from distillation, saying its gains came from original architectural changes.
The talks illustrate how open-weight Chinese models may seek international distribution: not only through proprietary APIs, but also through established cloud platforms. Whether that route becomes commercially viable for Moonshot will depend on the outcome of the negotiations and on continuing U.S. regulatory scrutiny.
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