Chinese AI startup Moonshot pursues Hong Kong listing within 6 months

Chinese AI startup Moonshot is pursuing a Hong Kong stock listing within six months, Bloomberg reported Sunday.

Sources told Bloomberg that Moonshot has formally circulated a resolution to shareholders seeking approval for the Hong Kong listing. The initiation of such a notification process is typically interpreted as a sign that a listing could proceed within six months.

Moonshot has been exploring a Hong Kong listing since the beginning of the year and has held discussions with China International Capital Corp. and Goldman Sachs over underwriting arrangements, sources said.

The company concluded that the timing was right for a listing after its annualized recurring revenue reached $300 million in June. ARR stood at $200 million in April.

Moonshot said its newly released model, Kimi K3, unveiled Friday, outperforms all competing models in overall performance except Anthropic's Claude Fable 5 and OpenAI's GPT-5.6, based on its own assessment.

K3 has about 2.8 trillion parameters — an exceptionally large scale for an open-weight model, some say.

AI performance research firm Artificial Analysis found that K3 surpassed Anthropic's Opus 4.8 on some frontier benchmarks, marking the first time a Chinese open-weight model has achieved such a result.

Demand for K3 surged in the 48 hours after its release, and Moonshot announced through social media that it was temporarily suspending new subscriptions, saying it would "prioritize allocating computing resources to existing members."

Sources said daily sales jumped at least sixfold after K3's launch. Bloomberg said the release "shook the conventional wisdom that the United States leads China in AI."

Bloomberg added that, as with last year's "DeepSeek shock," doubts have grown over whether Silicon Valley's massive AI investment will translate into commensurate results, and confidence in US leadership in AI has begun to crack.

Meanwhile, Bloomberg said Moonshot is expected to be valued at more than $30 billion in its ongoing investment round.

Moonshot was co-founded in early 2023 by Yang Zhilin, 34, and two of his classmates from Tsinghua University.

Yang holds a doctorate in AI from Carnegie Mellon University and previously worked at Meta Platforms and Google Brain. The company's Chinese name, Yuezhi Anmian, was inspired by Yang's favorite Pink Floyd album, "The Dark Side of the Moon."

Moonshot has long been overshadowed by DeepSeek but is considered one of the leaders of China's AI industry alongside Alibaba Group's Qwen, MiniMax and Z.AI. Its push toward a listing comes as the Chinese government steps up support for the domestic AI sector. President Xi Jinping recently praised China's low-cost AI achievements and called for a more open international technology order.

DeepSeek is also planning a 2027 listing alongside a second round of fundraising.