Moonshot AI pauses Kimi K3 subscriptions after surge

Moonshot AI temporarily paused new consumer subscriptions for its Kimi K3 model after rapid demand pushed its GPU clusters to capacity. The company launched Kimi K3 on Friday and announced the subscription pause on Sunday.

Available computing resources are being reserved for existing paid subscribers. New subscription slots will reopen in stages as additional compute capacity comes online, the company said.

Moonshot plans to split future memberships into two subscription options, including a dedicated coding plan aimed at developer workloads that require sustained model calls.

Kimi K3 is a 2.8 trillion-parameter, open-weight model designed for coding and agent-based tasks. Those tasks often make repeated requests to the model and require higher inference capacity.

Founded in 2023 by Yang Zhilin, Moonshot is based in Beijing. A fundraising document reviewed by the company shows it raised more than $2 billion in May from investors including Meituan, China Mobile and CPE, bringing total historical funding to over $5.5 billion. The company has been seeking up to $2 billion in additional capital and reached a reported valuation of $30 billion in June.

People familiar with the preparations, speaking on condition of anonymity, described the company as unwinding its existing offshore corporate structure ahead of a potential initial public offering in Hong Kong. Moonshot has engaged financial advisers, including Goldman Sachs and China International Capital Corp; any IPO timetable remains subject to change.

Rival Chinese AI developers are also raising funds to expand computing capacity. Export controls on advanced Nvidia chips have limited access to high-end GPUs, increasing the cost and difficulty of scaling large models.

Moonshot wrote on X: “Kimi K3 has received far more love than we expected, and our GPUs are feeling it.” The post said new subscription slots will return in stages once more compute becomes available.

Alibaba, an investor in Moonshot, has released a 2.4 trillion-parameter model. Moonshot said independent evaluations show Kimi K3 performs competitively against leading systems on certain technical benchmarks and noted that few users are likely to host a model of Kimi K3’s size because of the hardware costs involved.