The same Big Tech giants that built censorship infrastructure to silence Americans are now courting a Chinese AI startup the Treasury Department wants blacklisted — because there's money in it.
China's Moonshot AI is in early-stage talks with Microsoft, Amazon, and Google to host its Kimi K3 model on Azure, AWS, and Google Cloud, according to Reuters. Moonshot wants up to 30% of the revenue those platforms generate from K3-related services. If completed, it would be the first revenue-sharing arrangement between a Chinese AI developer and America's dominant cloud providers — handing a Beijing-backed company a direct pipeline into U.S. enterprise customers.
The model at the center of this is no toy. Kimi K3 packs 2.8 trillion parameters and has posted results comparable to OpenAI's GPT-5.5 and Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.8 on complex tasks, according to Artificial Analysis. Arena.ai ranked K3 first for web interface work. It's open-weight, meaning anyone can inspect it, but its sheer size makes self-hosting impractical for all but a handful of companies. That makes cloud distribution the only real game — and Microsoft, Amazon, and Google the gatekeepers.
The deal isn't close to done. The revenue split, data access provisions, and token auditing mechanisms are all unresolved. TNW noted that the auditing question is particularly sharp: the party counting the tokens is the party paying the share, so both sides need to agree on methodology. Data access is the harder problem. A Chinese company hosting a model on U.S. cloud infrastructure raises obvious questions about what it can observe of the prompts and outputs flowing through it — and enterprise customers routing sensitive information will want answers before they sign up.
Then there's Washington. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said last month that Moonshot could be added to a U.S. trade blacklist. American officials have accused the company of using distillation — training its model on outputs from Anthropic's Fable model — and illegally obtaining Nvidia chips. Moonshot denies both claims, telling China's National Business Daily that K3's gains came from original architecture changes, not distillation.
Three American cloud giants negotiating revenue shares with a company the Treasury Secretary wants blacklisted is not a simple proposition. Whether these talks close may depend less on commercial terms than on whether Washington decides to permit them at all.
For Moonshot, the timing is urgent. The startup, founded in 2023 by Carnegie Mellon-trained researcher Yang Zhilin and backed by Alibaba, raised over $2 billion in May and is preparing a Hong Kong IPO targeting a $30 billion valuation — a sevenfold jump in six months. International distribution through the world's largest clouds would materially change the revenue story Moonshot takes to investors. IBTimes reported that Alibaba is separately seeking revenue-sharing agreements for its own open-source AI model, meaning the Kimi K3 talks are one front in a broader Chinese push for U.S. cloud distribution.
The hyperscalers have their own calculation. Customers want cheaper, capable models. K3 is both. The alternative to hosting it is watching enterprises find it through other channels. TNW framed this as a pragmatic business decision for the cloud providers; IBTimes framed it as a potentially significant new distribution channel for Chinese AI in the American market. Both are right. That's the problem.
The companies that deplatformed Americans for questioning establishment narratives are now willing to route U.S. enterprise data through a Beijing-backed model — as long as the revenue share clears. National security is a conversation for later. The money is now.
The open question is whether Washington will treat this as the commercial deal the cloud providers want it to be, or as the foreign technology dependency it looks like.
