Moonshot AI is reportedly negotiating a revenue-sharing deal with Microsoft (MSFT), Amazon (AMZN) and Google (GOOGL) for its Kimi K3 AI model; it is seeking up to a 30% share of revenues from K3-related services in early stages
Reported negotiations of this kind sit in a familiar early-cycle pattern for frontier AI models: model developers seeking distribution through the hyperscalers' cloud and consumer surfaces, with revenue-sharing as the substitute for the capital-intensive alternative of building their own channels. The ask here, up to a 30% share of K3-related service revenues, reads as an opening position rather than a term sheet; comparable cloud-model arrangements have historically settled with the platform side retaining the larger economics in exchange for compute commitments, distribution, or both. The tell is whether all three of MSFT, AMZN and GOOGL are engaged simultaneously, since parallel talks of this sort typically function as an auction dynamic that firms up pricing for the model developer and often ends with one anchor partner. For the platforms, precedent is that incremental model catalogue additions move their equities only at the margin unless tied to capex or exclusivity; the more sensitive leg has tended to be the model developer's funding and valuation narrative. Confirmation, denial, or a single-partner leak is the near-term follow-on, alongside any disclosure of compute or hosting terms attached to the revenue split. As an unconfirmed report, the weight sits on the sourcing rather than the numbers.