China's Moonshot Seeks Revenue-Sharing Deals With US Tech Giants

China's Moonshot AI is negotiating revenue-sharing agreements with Microsoft, Amazon and Alphabet's Google to allow the cloud companies to host its Kimi K3 model, Reuters reported. If finalised, the deal would be the first major revenue-sharing arrangement between a Chinese AI firm and a large US cloud provider.

According to the report, Moonshot is seeking up to 30% of the revenue generated from K3-related services on Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud. This is said to be in line with terms the startup has offered other major customers of the open-weight model. The talks are at an early stage, and there is no certainty they will lead to agreements. Unresolved issues include how revenue will be split, data access, and auditing of token usage, the report said.

Scrutiny from Washington

The negotiations come despite criticism of Moonshot from senior US officials. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said last month he might add the company to a trade blacklist. US officials have also accused the Beijing-based firm of using Anthropic's technology to help build Kimi K3 and of illegally acquiring Nvidia chips. Moonshot has denied these claims, telling China's National Business Daily last month that its performance gains came from original changes to the model's architecture.

The discussions also come as Washington restricts the export of advanced AI chips to China over national security concerns, even as Chinese AI models, often priced lower than Western alternatives, gain adoption in the US.

Kimi K3 has performed well in independent evaluations. Arena.ai ranked it first in a benchmark assessing web interface-building capabilities, while Artificial Analysis said its performance was comparable to OpenAI's GPT-5.5 and Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.8, particularly on tests involving complex, multi-step tasks.

Major cloud providers remain the primary route for AI companies like Moonshot to reach enterprise customers. While Kimi K3 is an open-weight model that can be downloaded and modified, analysts reportedly said few users are likely to run its 2.8 trillion parameters on their own infrastructure due to high computing costs.

Moonshot has reportedly signed similar revenue-sharing agreements with smaller cloud platforms. In July, Chinese IT firm Chinasoft International said it had such an agreement with Moonshot, without disclosing terms.

Founded in 2023 by Yang Zhilin, Moonshot is backed by several Chinese technology firms, including Alibaba. The startup raised more than $2 billion in May and is preparing for a potential listing in Hong Kong.