People walk past the Moonshot booth promoting its Kimi K3 AI model, during the World Artificial Intelligence Conference (WAIC) in Shanghai, China, July 17. Reuters-Yonhap
Chinese start-up Moonshot AI has suspended new subscriptions for its groundbreaking new model Kimi K3 as surging demand squeezes its computing power, underscoring the challenges Chinese AI labs face in serving their products to global users.
"Over the past 48 hours, demand has pushed close to the limits of our current capacity," Beijing-based Moonshot AI said in a statement posted on X on Sunday. "Our GPUs [graphics processing units] are feeling it."
It had "temporarily paused new subscriptions", adding that existing subscribers were not affected. "We're adding capacity as fast as we can and will reopen new subscription spots in batches," said the company.
Late last week, Beijing-based Moonshot released Kimi K3, a 2.8 trillion-parameter large language model. It has outperformed top U.S. models GPT-5.6 Sol and Claude Fable 5 on some benchmarks, including Arena AI's ranking for front-end code development.
