The Kimi K3, an artificial intelligence model from Chinese company Moonshot AI, could be made available on Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google Cloud. The startup is negotiating revenue-sharing agreements with the three companies, reported Reuters on Wednesday (26), citing people familiar with the conversations.
Moonshot seeks to receive up to 30% of the revenue generated by services related to Kimi K3 on the platforms. The negotiations are still at an early stage and there is no guarantee they will result in contracts.
Moonshot, Microsoft, Google and AWS did not comment on the conversations. If the agreements advance, they could represent one of the first major revenue-sharing partnerships between a Chinese AI company and major American cloud providers.
Moonshot seeks to expand distribution of the Kimi K3
The Kimi K3 is an open-weight model, which allows its weights to be downloaded and modified. The system has 2.8 trillion parameters, a size that requires significant computational infrastructure for large-scale operation.
This demand makes platforms such as Azure, AWS and Google Cloud important channels for companies to use the model without having to maintain all the necessary infrastructure in their own data centers.
Among the points still unresolved in the negotiations are the division of revenue, access to data and the audit of token consumption. Tokens are units of text processed by models and serve as the basis for calculating costs in services charged according to usage.
The Kimi K3 also achieved outstanding results in independent evaluations. Arena.ai placed the model at the top of a benchmark focused on creating web interfaces, while Artificial Analysis pointed to performance comparable to advanced models from OpenAI and Anthropic in certain tests.
Moonshot has already closed similar agreements with smaller platforms. In July, Chinese company Chinasoft International announced a revenue-sharing partnership with the company, without revealing the percentages involved.
Negotiations occur amid US pressure
The conversations take place as Moonshot faces questions from US authorities. The United States Secretary of the Treasury, Scott Bessent, said last month that the company could be added to a list of trade restrictions.
US authorities also accused the company of using Anthropic technology in the development of the Kimi K3 and of acquiring Nvidia chips subject to export restrictions.
Moonshot rejected the claim that the model's performance was achieved through distillation of competing systems. The company said the advances came from its own changes to the model's architecture.
Founded in 2023 by researcher Yang Zhilin, Moonshot has Alibaba among its investors. The startup raised more than US$ 2 billion in May and is preparing a possible initial public offering in Hong Kong.
