Chinese startup Moonshot AI has temporarily paused new subscriptions after demand for its newly launched Kimi K3 model strained its computing capacity. The move comes as the company seeks fresh funding and prepares for a potential Hong Kong initial public offering.
Sources say Moonshot is unwinding its offshore structure ahead of a Hong Kong IPO. The company has engaged financial advisers, including Goldman Sachs and China International Capital Corp, to discuss the plan, though the timetable remains fluid.
Moonshot said since Kimi K3's release, it has drawn massive user interest, leading to "unprecedented compute challenges". Over the past 48 hours, user requests sharply exceeded forecasts and were approaching the limits of existing clusters.
The company will pause new consumer subscriptions immediately and allocate available computing power to current paid users. It will also split future memberships into two plans, including one for coding, to match compute resources more precisely with demand.
The capacity crunch follows a strong reception for Kimi K3, which Moonshot unveiled as a 2.8 trillion-parameter model, making it the world's largest open-weight AI system. Its size and focus on coding and agent-style tasks make it expensive to serve at scale.
The launch comes as other Chinese AI firms release more capable models, challenging assumptions that China's developers lag US peers. However, US export controls on advanced chips have made computing power a key constraint for these ambitious companies.