Kimi Maker Moonshot AI Quietly Files for a $3 Billion Hong Kong IPO 

Moonshot AI, the Beijing-based company behind the Kimi chatbot, has confidentially filed for an initial public offering in Hong Kong, according to three people familiar with the matter cited by Reuters, targeting a raise of roughly $3 billion.

The filing puts Moonshot among a growing wave of Chinese AI firms pursuing public listings this year.

It comes as the company’s latest model, Kimi K3, draws comparisons to U.S. frontier labs on benchmark performance, adding financial stakes to the AI competition.

Kimi K3 Is the Reason This IPO Timing Makes Sense

Moonshot’s decision to go public follows the July release of Kimi K3, a 2.8-trillion-parameter model that multiple outlets called a “DeepSeek moment,” referring to the earlier release of a Chinese open-weight model that matched Western AI performance at a lower cost. 

Last week, Reuters reported that Moonshot is in early-stage talks with Microsoft, Amazon, and Alphabet’s Google to host Kimi K3 on their cloud platforms, with Moonshot reportedly seeking as much as a 30% cut of revenue generated from K3-related services. 

By demanding a 30% cut, Moonshot is taking a page right out of the Microsoft and OpenAI playbook, using its model’s performance as leverage to land high-margin deals with global cloud giants ahead of its Hong Kong listing. 

The Valuation Math Keeps Climbing Fast

Moonshot’s fundraising over the past year shows how quickly investor interest has grown. 

In June, the company sought up to $2 billion at a $30 billion valuation, its third funding round in six months. 

Since then, Yahoo Finance reported that Moonshot was in talks to raise a pre IPO round at a valuation of roughly $50 billion, citing The Information. 

That would mean its valuation has risen by tens of billions of dollars in a matter of months. 

The growth mirrors rivals MiniMax and Zhipu AI, which debuted in Hong Kong in January and are now valued at roughly $40 billion each, suggesting investors see China’s leading AI labs as the next generation of major tech companies.

That expansion also aligns with China’s broader AI ambitions, reflected in President Xi Jinping’s proposed global AI governance framework in Shanghai. 

Why This Matters More for OpenAI Than It Might Seem

The real significance of Moonshot’s filing isn’t the $3 billion raise itself, but what it represents alongside Kimi K3’s performance: a credible and cost-competitive alternative to OpenAI and Anthropic now has capital market access to scale rather than remain a regional player. 

That pressure comes at an uncomfortable moment for OpenAI as its revenue grew 18% quarter over quarter to $6.7 billion in the second quarter, healthy but slower than Claude chatbot’s parent, which doubled over the same period according to The Wall Street Journal. 

As recently as early August, an industry insider dismissed reports of an imminent Moonshot Hong Kong filing as untrue, highlighting how quickly this market moves. 

Anthropic has filed for confidentiality for an IPO in June and is reportedly targeting its own share sale as soon as this month or October. At the same time, OpenAI’s own IPO plans continue to take shape. 

Against that backdrop, Moonshot’s move signals that the AI race is shifting toward who can turn technical leadership into public capital fastest. China’s AI sector is proving it can compete on that front too. 

Source: Chinese AI firm Moonshot files confidentially for Hong Kong IPO