Chinese AI lab Moonshot has banked about $3.5B in fresh capital, Bloomberg reports, landing at a $35B valuation that towers over the $1B to $2B the company first targeted.
The raise lands as Moonshot’s flagship model, Kimi K3, reshapes the global AI pricing landscape. On July 27 the Alibaba-backed lab released the 2.8 trillion-parameter open-weights model for free, letting any government, company or individual run it on their own hardware.
Kimi K3 ranks third on the Artificial Analysis index of AI systems, behind Anthropic’s Claude Fable 5 and OpenAI’s GPT-5.6 Sol Max, both of which charge users. Analysts say free access to a frontier-ranked model changes the math for governments building sovereign AI systems that now lease software from US cloud giants.
The valuation story has a growth metric behind it: Bloomberg puts Moonshot’s annual recurring revenue at $300M in June, triple the level in March. Reports also point to another private round, at up to $50B, before a possible Hong Kong listing.
Competitors are feeling the pressure. Three days after Kimi K3’s release, OpenAI cut prices on its GPT-5.6 Luna model by 80%, with input tokens falling to $0.20 per million.
