❯ Reuters Exclusive: Moonshot AI Seeks 30% Cut From Big Three Cloud Providers for Kimi K3 Hosting

TALKS REVEALEDReuters, citing people familiar with the matter, reports that Moonshot AI is in talks with Microsoft, Amazon, and Google over cloud hosting of Kimi K3, seeking up to 30% of related service revenue. Three terms remain unsettled: how revenue is split, what level of data access is granted, and how token usage is audited. Reuters explicitly states the talks are at an early stage and that no deal is guaranteed.

A FIRSTChinese models landing on US clouds is nothing new — since 2025, DeepSeek R1 has made its way onto Amazon Bedrock, Microsoft Azure AI Foundry, IBM watsonx, and Google Vertex AI. But those followed the open-weights, self-hosted integration path, with no publicly documented instance of payment to the model provider. If these talks succeed, it would be the first formal revenue-sharing arrangement between a Chinese AI company and a major US cloud provider.

LEVERAGE & HEADWINDSKimi K3 was released on July 16, with weights opened on July 27. It features a 2.8-trillion-parameter mixture-of-experts architecture, scores 60 on Artificial Analysis — tied with GLM-5.3 — and is priced at $3 per million input tokens and $15 per million output tokens. The company closed roughly $3.5 billion in funding in late July at a $35 billion valuation, versus just $4.3 billion at the start of the year. The headwinds are equally clear: US Treasury Secretary Bessent has publicly singled out the company for criticism. The real decision-makers are the compliance departments of the three cloud providers — turning a Chinese model from “free open weights, casually hosted” into “a formal supplier with a contract and a revenue share” is a fundamentally different proposition.

▪ SIGNALThe revenue-share talks were never just about the money — they’re about whether Chinese models get a named, legitimate supplier identity on US clouds.