Chinese artificial intelligence company Moonshot AI is negotiating revenue-sharing agreements with Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud that could grant the U.S. cloud providers up to 30% of revenue generated by its Kimi K3 model, according to sources familiar with the matter.
The discussions remain at an exploratory stage, and no final terms have been agreed upon. Moonshot, Microsoft, Amazon and Google declined to comment on the talks. Key unresolved issues include revenue allocation, data access protocols and the auditing of token usage for billing purposes, the sources said.
Moonshot, founded in 2023, raised more than $2 billion in May, valuing the company at a significant premium amid rapid expansion in China’s AI sector. The Kimi K3 model, an open-source system with 2.8 trillion parameters, has drawn attention for its performance in benchmark tests. Arena.ai ranked it first in a web interface development evaluation, while Artificial Analysis noted performance comparable to OpenAI’s GPT-5.5 and Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.8 in complex, multi-step tasks.
The negotiations coincide with heightened regulatory scrutiny. U.S. officials have accused Moonshot of plagiarizing Anthropic’s Fable model to develop Kimi K3 and of illegally acquiring Nvidia AI chips. U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said last month that the firm could face inclusion on a commercial blacklist. Moonshot has denied the allegations, asserting that performance improvements stem from original architectural modifications.
Beyond the U.S. cloud giants, Moonshot has secured similar revenue-sharing deals with smaller cloud platforms. In July, Chinese IT services provider Chinasoft International announced a partnership with Moonshot, while Alibaba is also pursuing revenue-sharing agreements with major users of its open-source AI model. Moonshot is also preparing for a potential initial public offering in Hong Kong, according to industry observers.
The outcome of the talks with Microsoft, Amazon and Google remains uncertain, and any agreement would mark the first major revenue-sharing arrangement between a Chinese AI company and a major U.S. cloud provider.
