Chinese AI startup Moonshot AI is in early talks with Microsoft, Amazon and Google over revenue-sharing deals that would let the three US cloud giants host its Kimi K3 model, with Moonshot seeking up to 30 percent of revenue generated from K3-related services, Reuters reported Wednesday, citing three people familiar with the discussions. [1] No Chinese AI company has struck a deal like this with a major US cloud provider before, making the talks — even at an early stage — a first for the industry. [1]
The talks arrive three weeks after this paper reported that Moonshot was shopping a $50 billion pre-money valuation to investors, anchored by China's National AI Industry Investment Fund — the same state vehicle simultaneously backing DeepSeek. That August 1 coverage argued the state fund was constructing a portfolio of frontier labs rather than backing a single winner, and framed Moonshot's valuation as a bet on China's ability to build a domestic AI ecosystem on a compressed timeline. Wednesday's cloud-hosting talks are the commercial follow-through on that bet: having raised capital on the strength of Kimi K3's release, Moonshot is now trying to get the model onto Azure, AWS and Google Cloud — the infrastructure that would let it scale globally rather than remain confined to Chinese cloud providers.
The proposed deals would let Microsoft, Amazon and Google host Kimi K3 — a roughly 2.8 trillion-parameter model — on their own platforms in exchange for a cut of the resulting revenue. [1][2] The talks remain early, and Reuters reported open questions still unresolved, including the exact revenue split, data access terms, and how token usage would be tracked and billed. [2] Microsoft, Google and Amazon Web Services all declined to comment when Reuters approached them for the story. [2]
The negotiations carry an unusual amount of political weight. US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent recently threatened Moonshot with a federal trade blacklist, and American officials have separately accused the company of improperly obtaining restricted Nvidia chips and extracting outputs from Anthropic's model to help build Kimi K3 — allegations Moonshot denies. [2] That backdrop means the cloud-hosting talks are unfolding at the exact moment US regulators are weighing whether to formally sanction the same company Silicon Valley's largest cloud providers are negotiating to host.
Reuters' coverage treats the story as a commercial negotiation: three sourced details on the revenue split, a straightforward "no deal like this before" framing, and brief comment-declined lines from the companies involved. [1] On X, the reaction has run considerably hotter. Chris McGuire, whose post embedding Reuters' own summary drew tens of thousands of views, argued the arrangement is "backwards and insane": "US companies are negotiating deals with Chinese AI firms that would pay Chinese firms for the right to spread Chinese AI models globally, using US-owned computing power." Other X users pushed back directly, arguing that Microsoft, Amazon and Google are driven by revenue and developer demand, not geopolitics, and that Kimi K3's price and capability profile makes it commercially attractive regardless of where it was built.
That disagreement — a security-and-sovereignty framing on one side, a straightforward-commerce framing on the other — is the same tension that ran through this paper's August 1 coverage of Moonshot's fundraising, just moved one step down the supply chain from capital to compute. Whether the deal closes on anything like the terms Moonshot is currently seeking will be the first real test of whether Washington's trade-ban threat or Silicon Valley's revenue appetite wins out.
-- DAVID CHEN, Beijing