A Chinese AI startup is trying to do something no Chinese AI company has pulled off before: get its model hosted on major US cloud platforms and take a slice of the revenue. Moonshot AI, the Beijing-based developer behind the Kimi K3 model, is in early talks with Microsoft, Amazon, and Google about revenue-sharing agreements that would put K3 on Azure, AWS, and Google Cloud. Moonshot is reportedly asking for up to 30 percent of revenue from K3 services, according to three people familiar with the discussions who spoke to Reuters.
The talks are nowhere near done. Sources say open questions include the exact revenue split, data access terms, and how token usage would even be tracked across three competing cloud infrastructures. All three US providers declined to comment to Reuters, which is exactly what you’d expect when the deal involves a Chinese AI company under active scrutiny from Washington.
That scrutiny is the elephant in the room. US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent recently threatened Moonshot with a trade ban, and US authorities have accused the company of stealing Anthropic’s model Fable. Moonshot denies the allegations. A revenue-sharing deal with American cloud giants would be a remarkable pivot for a company facing that kind of heat, and it’s hard to imagine the political optics going unnoticed on Capitol Hill.
Still, the commercial logic is clear enough. US cloud providers want access to competitive Chinese models because enterprise customers are asking for them, and Moonshot wants distribution beyond China’s borders. If a deal lands, it would set a precedent that reshapes how Chinese AI companies reach global users. If it falls apart, it’ll be one more data point in the ongoing decoupling of the two AI ecosystems. Either way, the fact that all three hyperscalers are even at the table says something about where the market pressure is coming from.
