Moonshot AI is reportedly planning to go public this year.

Moonshot AI has temporarily paused taking on new subscribers after an unexpected number of users swarmed to try out the world’s largest open-weight model.

In a post on Monday (19 July), the company said that the demand to test Kimi K3 pushed Moonshot close to capacity. “Kimi K3 has received far more love than we expected, and our GPUs are feeling it.

“To protect the experience of existing subscribers, we’re temporarily pausing new subscriptions and prioritising compute for current members,” the company said. Moonshot will be splitting subscriptions into plans to better manage capacity in the future, it added.

K3’s launch last week was followed by Chinese tech giant Alibaba’s Qwen3.8, a 2.4trn parameter model, which is supposedly “second only to [Anthropic’s] Fable 5”.

AI innovation in China is quickly closing in on the US, with new models from the country rivalling the latest from the likes of Anthropic and OpenAI.

This is despite the many restrictions Washington placed on semiconductor exports to China over recent years, which reports show pushed China to focus on its own chip capabilities instead.

Earlier this year, the country reportedly began restricting overseas travel for its top AI professionals in its escalating battle with the US over technological dominance.

Leading AI companies from both the countries are going public in swarms this year, with China’s Zhipu and MiniMax entering the arena earlier this year. Moonshot AI and China’s biggest AI company, DeepSeek, are expected to go public later this year.

Bloomberg reported that Moonshot is currently closing a funding round that could value the three-year-old start-up at more than $30bn. Meanwhile, DeepSeek is reportedly seeking a $74bn valuation ahead of its planned initial public offering. Investors are also anticipating blockbuster public listings from OpenAI and Anthropic.

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