MUMBAI: The AI race is getting a new twist, and this one comes with a revenue split. China’s Moonshot AI is in talks with Microsoft, Amazon and Google to bring its Kimi K3 artificial intelligence model to their cloud platforms under potential revenue-sharing arrangements, Reuters reported.
Moonshot is seeking as much as 30 per cent of revenue generated by K3-related services on Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google Cloud, according to people familiar with the discussions. The talks remain at an early stage, however, and there is no guarantee that a deal will be signed.
If completed, the arrangements could mark the first major revenue-sharing partnerships between a Chinese AI company and leading US cloud providers. They would also underline the growing interest in Chinese AI models in the US, even as Washington continues to raise national security concerns over China’s access to advanced AI technology.
Several key questions are still on the table, including how revenue would be divided, who would have access to data and how token usage would be audited. The last point is particularly important for AI services, where token consumption is used to calculate usage and billing.
Kimi K3 has attracted attention in external evaluations. Arena.ai ranked the model first in a benchmark focused on building web interfaces, while Artificial Analysis has assessed its performance as comparable with OpenAI’s GPT-5.5 and Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.8 on tests involving complex, multi-step tasks.
K3 is an open-weight model that can be downloaded and modified. But its scale comes with a sizeable computing bill: the model has 2.8 trillion parameters, making independent deployment computationally demanding and potentially increasing the appeal of cloud-based access for businesses.
Moonshot has already struck similar arrangements with smaller cloud platforms, although the financial terms have not been disclosed. Chinese IT services company Chinasoft International said in July that it had entered into a revenue-sharing agreement with Moonshot without revealing the split.
The commercial talks are unfolding alongside growing scrutiny of Moonshot in Washington. US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said last month that he could consider adding the company to a trade blacklist.
US officials have also accused Moonshot of taking technology from Anthropic’s Fable model to develop Kimi K3 and of illegally obtaining Nvidia chips. Moonshot has rejected the allegations surrounding K3’s development.
The company told China’s National Business Daily last month that the model’s improvements came from original changes to its underlying architecture and rejected claims that its performance was the result of distillation.
For Moonshot, a deal with one or more of the US cloud giants could turn K3 from a technically ambitious model into a more widely accessible commercial service. For the cloud companies, it could offer access to a Chinese AI model that is attracting global attention making these negotiations as much about AI access as they are about who gets a slice of the cloud revenue.
