Moonshot AI, the Beijing based lab behind the Kimi model family, is negotiating with Microsoft, Amazon, and Google to host its Kimi K3 model on Azure, AWS, and Google Cloud, according to Reuters. Reuters attributes the account to three people with direct knowledge of the negotiations, and says no Chinese AI company has previously landed this kind of hosting arrangement with a major American cloud provider. Reuters is careful to frame the discussions as preliminary: nothing resembling a signed agreement exists yet, and the outcome is genuinely uncertain.
What makes this notable is not the hosting itself. It is the structure Moonshot is reportedly asking for: a straight cut of revenue rather than a flat licensing fee or a one-time compute purchase. The three sources describe Moonshot’s opening ask as approaching 30 percent of revenue generated by K3 services, a starting position in the negotiation rather than a figure either side has locked in.
A revenue share turns the cloud providers into ongoing commercial partners of a Chinese model rather than neutral infrastructure that merely rents out servers. That distinction matters for how Microsoft, Amazon, and Google would explain the arrangement to customers, regulators, and their own boards. A licensing fee is a transaction. A revenue split is a standing financial relationship that persists for as long as K3 generates usage, and it ties a portion of each cloud provider’s AI revenue to a foreign lab’s model performance and reputation.
Basic terms remain unresolved. Reuters reports that the revenue split itself, data access rights, and how token usage would be tracked and audited across three separate cloud stacks are all still open questions. Any one of those could stall or kill the talks before a deal is signed.
The negotiations are unfolding against a hostile policy backdrop. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has raised the possibility of cutting Moonshot off from US trade entirely, a threat that Reuters reports as still pending rather than acted on. Running alongside it, US authorities have leveled a separate and unproven charge: that Moonshot lifted elements of Anthropic’s Fable model. Moonshot has pushed back forcefully against that accusation, and no finding of wrongdoing has been made public in either matter. Microsoft, Google, and AWS all declined to comment to Reuters, leaving the cloud providers’ actual appetite for the arrangement unstated.
That silence is itself informative. A hosting deal with a Chinese model under active federal scrutiny is a harder sell internally than a routine infrastructure partnership, and a flat “no comment” from all three companies suggests none of them wants to be first to confirm interest while the trade ban threat is live. If the talks collapse, the more likely reason is not the revenue percentage. It is the compliance exposure of hosting a model whose maker is simultaneously facing US trade action.
For cloud providers, the deal illustrates a wider shift: model hosting is becoming a revenue-sharing business line rather than a pure compute-rental one, a structure more commonly associated with app stores than with infrastructure providers. For enterprise buyers evaluating Kimi K3 or similar Chinese open models for US deployment, the theft accusation against Moonshot and the trade ban threat are the real near-term risk to track, independent of whether the cloud hosting deal ever closes.
Reuters first reported the talks on August 26, 2026.
