HONG KONG (AP) — A new and powerful Chinese artificial intelligence Kimi K3, a model that caused a stir in the U.S. tech industry, has temporarily suspended new subscriptions after inundating demand within days of its release exceeded production capacity.
This development highlights the challenges faced by China’s AI models. Cater to a growing user base As technology competition between the US and China intensifies domestically and internationally,
Open-source, low-cost, advanced AI models from China. DeepSeek’s latest V4, It is rapidly attracting worldwide attention. In early 2025, DeepSeek shook the global market and China became recognized as a serious nation. US competitorsChina’s frontier AI models are mainly open source.
“Kimi K3 is receiving much more love than we expected,” Beijing-based Moonshot AI wrote on XPost late Sunday. “Over the past 48 hours, demand has approached the limits of our current production capacity.”
Moonshot said it will prioritize existing subscribers and temporarily suspend new subscribers. “We are adding capacity as quickly as possible and plan to reopen new subscription spots in batches,” it added. The AI startup also posted a similar message on Chinese social media.
K3 was released to the public late last week and is intended to challenge more advanced AI models. human,OpenAI and so on, which horrifies U.S. rivals. With 2.8 trillion parameters describing the AI model’s capabilities, it is considered the world’s largest open source AI model.
“Release of a new model can generate significant public interest and strain existing computing infrastructure,” said Lian Jie Hsu, principal analyst at technology research and advisory group Omdia. “This indicates that Moonshot AI does not have enough computing chips to handle the current surge in demand.”
Su said the main reason is that Moonshot likely did not fully anticipate K3’s growing popularity. K3 is “very demanding” in terms of computing requirements, making it difficult and expensive to allocate compute, he said.
A measure of front-end coding ability, which is an indicator of AI model performance, led Kimi K3 to the top of the leading advanced AI model charts in Arena’s rankings, an AI model evaluation platform, after its public release.
The release of K3 includes put pressure on Shares of major U.S. technology companies rise on concerns that more affordable Chinese AI models could undermine pricing power and demand for U.S. AI companies, even with U.S.-led regulations already in place. shut out china You will lose access to some of the world’s most advanced technologies, including cutting-edge chips.
K3 is one of the latest new AI models launched in China that has garnered strong reactions from around the world.
Over the weekend, alibaba in china We also previewed the latest Qwen3.8 Max AI model. The company says the model is one of the most powerful in the world with 2.4 trillion parameters, second only to Anthropic’s Fable 5. Last month, Chinese startup Zhipu (Z.ai) also unveiled its GLM-5.2 model, which was rapidly adopted around the world.
