China-based artificial intelligence startup Moonshot AI is in early negotiations with Microsoft, Amazon Web Services (AWS), and Google Cloud regarding revenue-sharing agreements to host its open-weight Kimi K3 model on their respective cloud platforms, according to a report from Reuters.
According to people familiar with the matter, Moonshot is seeking up to a 30% cut of all revenue generated from hosting and serving Kimi K3 on the US hyperscaler platforms.
Commercial Licensing Clauses on Open Weights
While open-weight models have historically been treated as freely distributable compute artifacts, frontier model developers are increasingly attaching commercial monetization tiers to their releases.
Moonshot's Kimi K3 was distributed under modified licensing terms that mandate explicit commercial pacts for large-scale operators. Under the terms, any organization offering the model as a managed service that generates over $20 million in annual gross revenue must formalize a commercial licensing agreement with Moonshot AI.
The 30% revenue-sharing proposal aligns with terms Moonshot has presented to other enterprise deployments. In a recent regulatory disclosure, Chinese IT services vendor Chinasoft International confirmed that it had entered into a revenue-sharing agreement with Moonshot for model hosting services, though specific royalty percentages were not disclosed.
A Broader Shift in Open-Model Monetization
Moonshot is not the only developer attempting to convert open-weight model adoption into platform revenue. Alibaba has also begun exploring structured revenue-sharing mechanisms with hyperscalers and enterprise infrastructure providers deploying its latest open-source Qwen models.
For major US cloud providers, hosting high-demand open-weight models is necessary to retain enterprise AI workloads, yet the proposed 30% cut inverts typical cloud marketplace dynamics where infrastructure operators extract margins from software providers.
The discussions remain preliminary and subject to regulatory scrutiny. Moonshot, which raised more than $2 billion in May 2026 ahead of a planned Hong Kong initial public offering, faces geopolitical headwinds in the United States. US Treasury officials have previously signaled potential trade blacklist considerations regarding Beijing-based frontier labs.
Neither Moonshot AI, Microsoft, Amazon, nor Google provided formal comment on the status of ongoing talks.
