Moonshot AI Seeks Up to 30% Revenue Share with US Cloud Giants

Moonshot AI has made significant strides in recent months, sitting at two major 'tables' in the US. The company is being considered for addition to the trade blacklist by the US government, following accusations that it developed Kimi K3 by distilling Anthropic's Fable and obtaining NVIDIA GB300 servers.

Moonshot AI has denied these allegations, stating that K3's performance improvement comes from original architectural optimizations. Meanwhile, the company is also in commercial negotiations with Microsoft, Amazon, and Google to make Kimi K3 available on Azure, AWS, and Google Cloud.

The potential revenue-sharing agreement between Moonshot AI and the US cloud vendors could be significant, with the Chinese AI company hoping to take up to 30% of the revenue generated by K3-related services on the three major cloud platforms. This would mark a first for a Chinese AI company in terms of revenue sharing agreements with large US cloud vendors.

The development comes after IBM signed a multi-year $240 million agreement with Together AI to build an AI inference cluster on IBM Cloud, which included domestic Chinese models such as DeepSeek, Kimi, and MiniMax. Moonshot AI's negotiations with Microsoft, Amazon, and Google indicate that domestic Chinese models are increasingly entering the US market.