China's Moonshot AI is negotiating revenue-sharing deals with Microsoft, Amazon, and Google to host its Kimi K3 model

[SignalMage]

China's Moonshot AI is in talks with Microsoft, Amazon, and Alphabet's Google over revenue sharing agreements that would let the three US cloud giants host its Kimi K3 model, according to Reuters reporting citing three people familiar with the private discussions. If finalized, any such deal would mark the first major revenue sharing pact between a Chinese AI company and a major US cloud provider, a remarkably notable milestone given the current state of tension between Washington and Beijing over AI and chip exports specifically.

Moonshot, which is preparing for a potential IPO, is reportedly seeking up to a 30 percent share of revenue generated from K3 related services running on Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services, and Google Cloud. Unresolved sticking points in the negotiations reportedly include exactly how revenue would actually get split, what level of data access each side gets, and how token usage gets audited, tokens being the basic units of text an AI model processes, with accurate usage tracking sitting at the center of any usage based billing arrangement.

Kimi K3 has posted plainly strong results in independent third party evaluations. Arena.ai ranked it first in a benchmark specifically assessing web interface building capability, and Artificial Analysis rates its performance as comparable to OpenAI's GPT-5.5 and Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.8, particularly on tests measuring complex, multi step reasoning tasks. Despite K3 being an open weight model that anyone can technically download and modify, analysts note few customers are actually likely to run a 2.8 trillion parameter model on their own infrastructure given the sheer computing cost involved, which is precisely why major cloud providers remain the primary route to real enterprise adoption for a model this size.

Moonshot has reportedly already signed similar revenue sharing arrangements with smaller cloud platforms, including a deal disclosed in July with Chinese IT services provider Chinasoft International, though the exact revenue split in that agreement wasn't disclosed. Founded in 2023 by Carnegie Mellon trained researcher Yang Zhilin and backed by several major Chinese tech companies including Alibaba, Moonshot raised more than 2 billion dollars in May. Alibaba itself is separately reported to be seeking similar revenue sharing agreements with major users of its own newer open source AI model, suggesting this specific commercial structure could become a broader pattern for how Chinese AI labs monetize access to Western enterprise customers going forward

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