According to three people familiar with the talks, China’s Moonshot AI is negotiating revenue-sharing agreements with Microsoft (MSFT.O), Amazon (AMZN.O), and Alphabet’s Google (GOOGL.O). These agreements would enable the U.S. cloud giants to host its popular Kimi K3 model.
Any agreement might be the first significant revenue-sharing agreement between a major U.S. cloud provider and a Chinese AI business.
The talks show how, despite Washington’s national security worries, which have resulted in restrictions on the sale of AI processors to China, China’s top AI models—which are frequently significantly less expensive than Western products—are gaining popularity in the United States. They are also happening in spite of senior U.S. officials’ unfavorable remarks regarding Moonshot.
According to individuals who wished to remain anonymous due to the confidentiality of the conversations, IPO-bound Moonshot is aiming for up to a 30% portion of the profits from K3-related services on Microsoft’s Azure, Amazon Web Services, and Google Cloud.
That would be consistent with the conditions that the business has reportedly laid out for significant clients utilizing the open-weight approach.
According to the sources, the talks are still in their early stages and there is no guaranty that agreements would be reached.
A request for comment regarding the possible deals was not answered by Moonshot. AWS, Google, and Microsoft declined to comment.
U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has criticized Moonshot, stating last month that he may put it on a trade blacklist. The Beijing-based company has been accused by U.S. regulators of illegally acquiring Nvidia (NVDA.O), opening new table chips, and stealing from Anthropic’s most advanced model, Fable, to assist construct Kimi K3.
One of the sources claims that remaining concerns in Moonshot’s negotiations with the U.S. cloud providers include auditing token usage, data access, and potential income splitting.
Under usage-based invoicing, assessing the use of tokens—text units processed by AI models—is essential to determining income.
