China's Moonshot in talks with Microsoft, Amazon, Google over K3 revenue sharing, sources say

Chinese artificial intelligence startup Moonshot AI is in talks with U.S. cloud hyperscalers Microsoft, Amazon Web Services, and Alphabet's Google to establish revenue-sharing agreements for hosting its flagship Kimi K3 model. Under the proposed structure, the Beijing-based startup is seeking up to a 30% share of revenue generated from K3-related cloud usage across Microsoft Azure, AWS, and Google Cloud platforms. If finalized, the agreements would represent the first significant revenue-sharing pacts between a Chinese AI developer and major American cloud providers. The negotiations come despite escalating geopolitical and technological tensions between the U.S. and China, including stringent chip export controls and regulatory scrutiny. Moonshot, which raised more than $2 billion in May 2026 and is preparing for an initial public offering in Hong Kong, developed the 2.8-trillion parameter open-weight model to compete with top-tier Western foundation models. Major cloud hosting is considered essential for enterprise adoption given the high computing power required to run the architecture.