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China’s Moonshot AI is in early talks with Microsoft, Amazon and Google to host Kimi K3 Credit: Bangla press via Shutterstock.com Moonshot AI is in early discussions with Microsoft, Amazon, and Google about hosting Kimi K3 on their cloud platforms, seeking up to 30% of the revenue those services generate, according to Reuters. It would be the first arrangement of its kind between a Chinese AI company and the major American clouds, involving a model that Moonshot released as the world’s largest open model and that rattled markets when it landed. The model K3 runs to 2.8 trillion parameters, which makes it open in licence but impractical for most organisations to host themselves, because the compute required to serve it is beyond what all but a handful of companies can assemble. Open weights therefore do not remove the need for a cloud provider; they change who the cloud provider is competing with. Moonshot gets distribution it could not build, and the hyperscalers get a model that has been performing well against the American frontier, with Arena.ai ranking K3 first for web interface work. What has not been settled is most of the deal. The revenue split itself, data access provisions, and how token usage would be audited are all open, and token counts are what usage-based billing rests on. That auditing question is more delicate than it sounds. Both sides would need to agree a method for counting the units of text a model processes, in an arrangement where the party doing the counting is the party paying the share. Data access is the provision most likely to decide this. A Chinese company hosting a model on Azure or AWS raises immediate questions about what it can see of the prompts and outputs flowing through it, and enterprise customers will want an answer before they route anything sensitive. The politics are considerably harder than the accounting. US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has suggested adding Moonshot to trade blacklists, and American officials have accused the company of distilling other companies’ models and acquiring chips illegally, allegations Moonshot denies. Three US cloud providers signing revenue-sharing agreements with a company the Treasury Secretary wants blacklisted is not a straightforward proposition. Whether these talks conclude may depend less on the terms than on whether Washington decides they are permissible at all. For Moonshot, the timing is commercially significant. The company has been preparing a Hong Kong listing at a $30bn valuation, and international distribution through the largest clouds in the world would materially change the revenue story it takes to investors. The valuation trajectory is its own story. Moonshot reached a $30bn target after a sevenfold jump in six months, which is the kind of repricing that makes distribution deals urgent rather than opportunistic. Its valuation has already moved at a pace that requires explanation. Moonshot went from roughly $20bn to a $30bn target in about six months, and a business selling model access to Chinese customers alone has a smaller ceiling than one selling through Azure, AWS, and Google Cloud. There is also a sovereignty argument that cuts against the deal in Europe, where buyers have spent two years being told to reduce dependence on foreign models. A Chinese model served through an American cloud is not obviously the answer to that concern, though it may be the cheapest one. The hyperscalers have their own calculation. Customers keep asking for cheaper, capable models; K3 is both, and the alternative to hosting it is watching enterprises route to it some other way, which is exactly the argument that has driven every previous decision to carry a rival’s model. A 30% share is aggressive, though it reportedly matches what Moonshot has been asking large customers. It also inverts the usual arrangement, in which the platform takes the cut, and the developer receives the remainder. Nothing has been agreed, and all four companies declined to comment beyond confirming nothing further. Early-stage talks reported by sources are the most likely of all deal stories to end quietly, particularly ones that require a US policy question to be resolved first. Get the TNW newsletter Get the most important tech news in your inbox each week.