China's Moonshot AI debuts a 2.8-trillion-parameter open-weight model with competitive API pricing and a $20B valuation to match
China’s AI race just got a louder entry. Yang Zhilin, founder of Moonshot AI, took the stage at NVIDIA’s GPU Technology Conference in 2026 to unveil Kimi K3, a multimodal AI model the company is positioning as a direct competitor to the best the US has built.
The timing is deliberate. Moonshot AI closed a $2B funding round in May 2026, pushing its valuation past $20B, and the GTC stage is arguably the most prominent venue in the AI hardware and software calendar.
What Kimi K3 actually is #
Kimi K3 has 2.8 trillion parameters and a context window of 1 million tokens, meaning the model can hold and reason over an enormous amount of information in a single session.
The model is described as open-weight, which allows developers to download and run the model themselves, rather than being locked into paying per API call. Competitors like OpenAI’s GPT series remain largely closed, making Kimi K3’s openness a genuine differentiator in markets where developers want control over their infrastructure.
Beyond language, Kimi K3 incorporates vision processing, making it multimodal. Developers can feed it images alongside text, opening up use cases in document analysis, visual reasoning, and product recognition, among others.
The pricing play #
Moonshot AI set API access to Kimi K3 at $3 per million input tokens and $15 per million output tokens.
It’s worth noting that Moonshot AI is not the first Chinese AI firm to use pricing aggression as a market entry strategy. DeepSeek did something similar earlier in 2025 with its R1 model release, which rattled US AI stocks and sparked a broader conversation about whether Western firms had been overcharging for comparable capabilities.
Who’s behind the company #
Yang Zhilin holds a PhD from Carnegie Mellon University. He co-founded Moonshot AI in March 2023, which means the company went from founding to a $20B valuation and a GTC keynote slot in roughly three years.
The $2B May 2026 funding round was led by Meituan, China’s dominant food delivery and local services platform, with Alibaba also among the backers.
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