Kimi K3: Moonshot AI Pauses New Subscriptions as Demand Overwhelms Its GPUs

The launch of Kimi K3 has apparently gone better than Moonshot AI planned – so well, in fact, that the Chinese AI startup now has to pull the emergency brake. As the company announced on X on Sunday, demand for the model, which was only unveiled on Friday, nearly exhausted its available GPU capacity within 48 hours. The consequence: new subscriptions are being temporarily paused.

The model has received “far more love” than expected, Moonshot AI wrote in the post. Over the past two days, demand has pushed “close to the limits of our current capacity.” To protect the experience of existing subscribers, compute is now being prioritized for current members. Existing subscriptions are not affected by the freeze. According to the company, it is adding capacity as fast as possible in order to reopen new subscription spots “in batches.”

Kimi K3 is already being described as the next “DeepSeek moment.” It is the first open-weight model to come close to the performance of proprietary US models. On Artificial Analysis, Kimi K3 ranks third, behind only the two top models from Anthropic and OpenAI:

Two Separate Membership Plans Are Meant to Distribute Compute More Efficiently

In parallel, Moonshot AI is testing a structural change to use its computing resources more efficiently: membership is being split into two plans. The “Kimi Membership” will cover Kimi Web, App, and Work, while the “Kimi Code Membership” is aimed specifically at coding workflows. The company says this will allow it to allocate compute more precisely and keep the service stable.

Moonshot AI unveiled Kimi K3 on Friday under the banner of “Open Frontier Intelligence,” stating its ambition to compete with models from Anthropic and OpenAI – particularly in coding, knowledge work, and reasoning. The release of the full open-weight version is scheduled for July 27. Developers will then be able to download the trained parameters and run, modify, or build upon the model themselves.

China Is Closing In on the US Frontier

The rush for Kimi K3 fits into a trend that has occupied the industry for months: the gap between frontier models from Chinese and American AI labs is shrinking. Anthropic and OpenAI have repeatedly called for stronger government regulation to help the US maintain its lead over China in the AI race.

At the same time, more and more companies are discovering Chinese models as cost-effective alternatives to US providers. Several US executives, including Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong and Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky, have publicly spoken about their companies’ use of models such as Kimi, Z.ai’s GLM-5.2, and Alibaba’s Qwen. Whether Moonshot AI will be able to fully meet demand after the open-weight release on July 27 remains to be seen – but the current subscription freeze shows just how quickly compute is becoming a bottleneck right now.