# Google Cloud will retire Moonshot AI's Kimi K2 endpoint in October > Source: > Published: 2026-07-29 17:55:21+00:00 [Yang Zhilin](https://www.lti.cs.cmu.edu/people/alumni/alumni-2019/yang-zhilin.html)'s Beijing-based [Moonshot AI](https://www.moonshot.ai/about) still has its [Kimi K2 Thinking model](https://docs.cloud.google.com/gemini-enterprise-agent-platform/models/maas/kimi/kimi-k2-thinking) available through Google Cloud as a managed API, though Google deprecated the endpoint on July 21st and plans to retire it on October 21st. The arrangement drew renewed scrutiny Wednesday after [Chris McGuire (@ChrisRMcGuire)](https://x.com/ChrisRMcGuire) argued [in a post on X](https://x.com/chrisrmcguire/status/2082486881904668905?s=46) that Google was paying Moonshot for the right to host the Chinese developer's model and serve it to US customers using US chips. "This obviously should not be allowed," McGuire wrote. Google's public documentation confirms the central technical point: Kimi K2 Thinking has been offered through Google's Model Garden as a serverless, managed API. The model supports pay-as-you-go access, provisioned throughput and processing in Google's US multi-region. Customers call a Google Cloud endpoint without provisioning their own [inference infrastructure](/article/megaport-s-594-million-raise-puts-a-price-on-ai-inference-infrastructure). The documents do not establish McGuire's claims about payments from Google to Moonshot or the underlying chips. Google's pages describe what customers pay Google and how the service operates, rather than commercial terms between Google and Moonshot. Google [prices Kimi K2 Thinking](https://cloud.google.com/gemini-enterprise-agent-platform/generative-ai/pricing) at $0.60 per million input tokens, $2.50 per million output tokens and $0.06 per million cached tokens. ### An eight-month-old listing nearing retirement Google added Kimi K2 Thinking to Model Garden on November 13th, 2025, according to its [Vertex AI release notes](https://docs.cloud.google.com/vertex-ai/docs/release-notes). The listing gave enterprise developers managed access to an open-weight Chinese model through the same cloud environment used for Google's own models and third-party systems. Google describes Kimi K2 Thinking as a reasoning and tool-use model capable of making between 200 and 300 sequential tool calls. Its managed endpoint, `kimi-k2-thinking-maas` , supports function calling, structured output and a context window of 262,144 tokens. The July 21st deprecation was part of a [broader endpoint retirement](https://docs.cloud.google.com/gemini-enterprise-agent-platform/release-notes), rather than an action limited to Moonshot or Chinese developers. Google placed models from DeepSeek, Z.ai, MiniMax and Alibaba's Qwen on the same October 21st retirement schedule, alongside OpenAI's `gpt-oss-20b` and Meta's Llama 3.3 70B. That batch makes it difficult to read the Kimi retirement itself as a geopolitical decision. Google continues to list Kimi K2 Thinking and its customer pricing during the wind-down period. Moonshot, meanwhile, has moved its own product line forward: its [API platform](https://platform.kimi.ai/) currently markets Kimi K3 as its flagship model. ### Moonshot's US research roots Moonshot's founders complicate a simple US-versus-China framing. Yang completed a PhD in language and information technology at Carnegie Mellon University in 2019 and contributed to research including Transformer-XL and XLNet before starting Moonshot in early 2023. Co-founder [Yuxin Wu](https://ppwwyyxx.com/) also studied at Carnegie Mellon after earning his bachelor's degree at Tsinghua University. Wu says he worked on foundation models at Google Brain and computer vision at Facebook AI Research before Moonshot. He created Detectron2 and contributed to research including Group Normalization and Momentum Contrast. Moonshot has since become one of China's best-capitalized private AI developers. [TechCrunch reported in May](https://techcrunch.com/2026/05/07/chinas-moonshot-ai-raises-2b-at-20b-valuation-as-demand-for-open-source-ai-skyrockets/) that Moonshot raised about $2 billion at a valuation of roughly $20 billion, citing a financial adviser involved in the transaction. The report said annual recurring revenue exceeded $200 million in April, driven by subscriptions and API usage. Google's Kimi listing shows how open-weight models cross national boundaries after release. A US cloud provider can package a model from a Beijing lab as enterprise infrastructure, bill developers by the token and run requests through a familiar API. The public record supports that distribution relationship. It does not support the specific assertion that Google is paying Moonshot, and the endpoint is already scheduled to disappear less than three months from now.