Moonshot AI in revenue-sharing talks with Microsoft, Amazon, Google over Kimi K3, seeking up to 30%

Moonshot AI, the Chinese startup behind the Kimi family of models, is negotiating revenue-sharing agreements with Microsoft, Amazon and Google for its Kimi K3 model, according to a report from Chinese financial outlet CLS relayed by Jiemian and republished on Sohu. Citing people familiar with the matter, the report says Moonshot is initially seeking up to a 30% cut of revenue generated from K3-related services.

If concluded, it would be the first large-model revenue-sharing deal between a Chinese AI company and the US cloud giants. But the talks are still in an early phase: the accounting basis for the split, the rollout timeline and the boundaries of services have not been finalized, and all three cloud vendors plus Moonshot declined to comment publicly.

The reported 30% figure would exceed market expectations — industry observers had assumed 20% was the ceiling. In July, Chinasoft International announced a revenue-sharing agreement with Moonshot, though it did not disclose the ratio.

The leverage behind the negotiation is the technical differentiation of Kimi K3, released on July 17 with 2.8 trillion total parameters and roughly 104 billion active parameters — described as the world's first open-source model at the 3-trillion-parameter class, supporting text, image and video multimodal understanding.

At launch, nearly 3,700 developers queued to download the model; within 30 minutes it drew more than 4,000 likes on Hugging Face and topped the trend charts, with Elon Musk leaving an “Impressive” comment. Demand outstripped compute so sharply that Moonshot briefly paused new consumer subscriptions.

Moonshot has opened the model's weights, but the K3 license includes specific terms for large MaaS platforms: any enterprise whose combined revenue with affiliates exceeds $20 million over 12 consecutive months must sign a separate agreement with Moonshot before using K3 commercially. K3 is already available through inference providers including Together AI, Fireworks, DigitalOcean, Modal, Baseten and DeepInfra.

The commercial stakes are rising fast. Kimi's API revenue has grown 400% and now accounts for more than 70% of company revenue; overseas paid users are up 400% and the product has reached more than 180 countries. By mid-June, Kimi's annual recurring revenue had passed $300 million, up from $100 million in March.

Industry observers say the talks carry symbolic weight regardless of the outcome: Chinese models are moving from open-source sharing toward standardized commercial monetization and global value-sharing. OpenRouter data cited in the report put Chinese models at roughly 63.5% of token share over the prior 28 days as of late July.