# Moonshot AI Seeks Up to 30% of Revenue to Put Kimi K3 on Microsoft, Amazon and Google Clouds

The talks are early, with data access and token auditing still unresolved, and they continue despite a warning from the US Treasury that Moonshot could be added to a trade blacklist.

- Published: 2026-08-28T06:11:21.137Z
- Canonical: https://polylog.news/ai/2026-08-28/moonshot-ai-seeks-up-to-30-of-revenue-to-put-kimi-k3-on-micr
- Publisher: Polylog (AI desk)
- Section: tech
- Sources: [Polylog editors](https://polylog.news), [The Express Tribune (Reuters)](https://tribune.com.pk/story/2625954/chinas-moonshot-in-talks-with-microsoft-amazon-google-over-k3-revenue-sharing-sources-say), [Tom's Hardware](https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/moonshot-releases-2-8-trillion-parameter-kimi-k3)

Moonshot AI, the Beijing developer of the Kimi model family, is in early talks with Microsoft, Amazon and Google to host its flagship Kimi K3 model on Azure, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google Cloud. According to a Reuters report citing people familiar with the negotiations, Moonshot is asking for as much as [30 percent of the revenue generated by K3-based services](https://tribune.com.pk/story/2625954/chinas-moonshot-in-talks-with-microsoft-amazon-google-over-k3-revenue-sharing-sources-say). The same reporting was [relayed in Russian-language AI channels](https://t.me/ai_machinelearning_big_data/10786) on Thursday. No agreement has been reached, and the parties have not settled how revenue would be divided, what data access the clouds would get, or how token usage would be audited.

The commercial logic is straightforward. K3 shipped as an open-weight model on 27 July under a modified MIT license, with 2.8 trillion total parameters, roughly 104 billion active per token across 896 experts, a one-million-token context window and a native MXFP4 checkpoint. Tom's Hardware described it as [the largest open-weight model released to date](https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/moonshot-releases-2-8-trillion-parameter-kimi-k3). Because the weights are downloadable, any cloud can already serve K3 without asking Moonshot for anything. What Moonshot is selling is not access but the brand, the tuning recipes and a formal relationship, and it wants a share of revenue similar to what a closed-model licensing deal would command.

Independent trackers place K3 near the closed frontier rather than at it. Artificial Analysis ranks it third on its aggregate intelligence index behind Anthropic's Fable 5 and OpenAI's GPT-5.6 Sol Max, while blind developer voting on Frontend Code Arena put K3 first at 1,679 points. Moonshot's own reported figures of 81.2 on FrontierSWE and 88.3 on Terminal-Bench 2.0 are vendor numbers and have not been independently reproduced at that exact configuration.

The obstacle is political rather than technical. US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said last month that Moonshot could be added to a trade blacklist, and US officials have accused the company of improperly using Anthropic's Fable model in K3's development and of obtaining Nvidia chips in violation of export rules. Moonshot has not conceded either claim. A hyperscaler that signs a revenue-sharing contract with a company facing that level of official suspicion takes on a policy risk that a plain open-weight deployment does not carry.

## What this means

If any of the three clouds signs, a Chinese lab would collect recurring revenue from American infrastructure for the first time, and the open-weight release would stop functioning purely as a bid for market share and become a revenue-generating business model. The parties exposed are the closed-model vendors, whose pricing depends on customers having no comparable alternative, and the hyperscalers themselves, who would be underwriting a supplier that the US government has already threatened to restrict. Two outcomes would resolve this. Either a cloud accepts the political risk in exchange for a cheaper model tier, or the blacklist threat leads the clouds to keep serving K3 weights informally without paying Moonshot anything.

## What to watch

- Whether any of the three clouds confirms a K3 listing with commercial terms, which would show hyperscalers are willing to price political risk rather than avoid it.
- Whether the US Treasury follows through on adding Moonshot to a restricted-entity list, which would end the talks and signal that model provenance, not just chips, is now an export-control target.
- Independent reproductions of Moonshot's FrontierSWE and Terminal-Bench scores on the released weights, which would tell buyers whether the price gap reflects real capability parity.