AP (Hong Kong), July 20, 2026: Moonshot AI’s Kimi K3 has suspended new subscriptions after overwhelming demand pushed capacity close to its limits within days of launch.
Moonshot (Beijing-based) wrote on X late Sunday: “Kimi K3 has received far more love than we expected. Over the past 48 hours, demand has pushed close to the limits of our current capacity.” The company is prioritizing existing subscribers and temporarily pausing new ones; “We’re adding capacity as fast as we can and will reopen new subscription spots in batches.” Similar message posted on Chinese social media.
Context: K3 public rollout late last week aims to challenge Anthropic, OpenAI and others. At 2.8 trillion parameters it is described as the world’s largest open-source AI model. Chinese open-source, lower-cost advanced models (including DeepSeek V4) have been gaining global attention.
Analyst Lian Jye Su (Omdia): new model releases generally trigger massive interest that can strain compute infrastructure; this shows Moonshot does not have sufficient compute chips to serve the current surge. Key reason likely Moonshot not fully anticipating popularity; K3 is “very demanding” in compute, making allocation challenging and expensive.
By front-end coding capability on Arena rankings after public release, Kimi K3 topped major advanced models. Release also pressured U.S. tech stocks on worries that more affordable Chinese models may undercut U.S. AI pricing power — even as U.S. restrictions bar China from some cutting-edge chips.
Related weekend: Alibaba previewed Qwen3.8 Max (2.4T parameters), claimed second only to Anthropic’s Fable 5. Last month Zhipu (Z.ai) rolled out GLM-5.2 with rapid global adoption.