The business relationship between Chinese and American large language models is moving past the rough "API resale" era and into a real revenue-sharing negotiation. According to a Reuters report carried by Solidot, Moonshot AI is in talks with Microsoft Azure, Amazon AWS, and Google Cloud over a revenue split on its flagship Kimi K3 hosting services, seeking up to 30% of revenue from K3-related APIs and managed deployments (original: https://www.solidot.org/story?sid=85201).

How far the talks have gone

As relayed by Solidot, the negotiations are still at an early stage and whether they will land remains uncertain. But if any one of the U.S. cloud giants signs on, this would mark the first major AI-model revenue-sharing agreement between China and the United States. The fact that a Chinese frontier model house like Moonshot is willing to hand over part of its core revenue to an American cloud provider, rather than continuing to sell API access directly, is itself worth examining.

Why American clouds are willing to sit down

The force driving these talks is the price differential of Chinese models. Recent Ramp data covering 70,000 U.S. businesses shows Anthropic's flagship Fable 5 priced at $10 per million input tokens, while Flash-class Chinese models such as DeepSeek V4-Flash have pushed input pricing down to $0.14 per million tokens—a more than 70x gap (Reuters report via Solidot). Even after taking a 30% cut, a cloud provider selling K3 as a flagship SKU still runs a healthier margin than its own frontier models.

For the Chinese model vendor, this is a shortcut to trading equity for compute. K3 is already tight on domestic inference capacity; offloading a slice of traffic to AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud's overseas clusters bypasses China's GPU ceiling while leveraging U.S. cloud sales channels to reach American enterprise customers directly.

A new upstream-downstream relationship

For the past two years, the China-U.S. AI supply chain has roughly looked like "China ships the models, the U.S. ships the shelf" (Hugging Face, NVIDIA, AWS Bedrock)—the cloud is just the shelf, and the model vendor never gets a cut. What Moonshot wants now is to convert the cloud from shelf to channel, taking a percentage on its own. This is a signal for every non-U.S. model house: Qwen, DeepSeek, Zhipu GLM will likely walk a similar "hosting-plus-revenue-share" path next.

For AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud, winning Kimi K3 means filling the missing "open-source, cheap, Chinese-friendly" tile in their model marketplaces—pulling back the enterprise customers who have been priced out of frontier-tier models.

So what

The deal isn't signed, and there are many variables left—export controls, compliance review, pricing power. Any one of them can drag this out for a long time. But what's clear is that Chinese frontier models no longer want to make money the old, hard way of charging per-token API fees; they are starting to adopt the game industry's distribution-revenue-share playbook and fold cloud channels into their revenue structure. For enterprise IT procurement, the odds are rising that within the next 12 months we'll see combos like "Fable 5 + Opus 5 + Kimi K3" sitting under the same cloud console—in the second half of the pricing war, the cloud channel is the real table.