China’s Moonshot AI pauses new signups for Kimi K3 as demand overwhelms GPUs | Technology News
3 min readNew DelhiJul 20, 2026 12:34 PM One sign an AI launch is going well? You have to put new users on hold, and that is exactly what Chinese startup Moonshot AI has done just a week after the release of Kimi K3, its latest AI model with performance comparable to leading models from US rivals OpenAI and Anthropic at some key tasks.
In a post on X on Sunday, July 19, Moonshot AI said that Kimi K3 has received far more love than expected, and that its GPUs were coming under strain due to the surge in demand.
The company announced that it is temporarily pausing new subscriptions on its AI chatbot platform in order to prioritise exing customers. Moonshot AI added that it is working on adding capacity as fast as possible to reopen new subscription spots in batches.
“Over the past 48 hours, demand has pushed close to the limits of our current capacity. To protect the experience of exing subscribers, we’re temporarily pausing new subscriptions and prioritising compute for current members,” Moonshot AI wrote.
Besides the temporary pause, the company is also looking to handle compute more effectively splitting membership tiers into two plans called Kimi Membership for Kimi Web, App, and Work; and Kimi Code Membership for coding workflows. “This will help us match compute more precisely and keep the experience stable,” it added.
Note, Kimi K3 was launched on July 16 but the company is yet to release the full open-weights of the model. As a result, it is not currently possible for developers to download and modify them similar to other open-weight AI models. Moonshot AI previously said that it plans to release a full open-weight model on July 27. This would enable developers to download the model’s trained parameters and run, modify, or build upon it themselves.
Kimi K3 gaining ground is significant as it continues to stir debates about whether the gap between Chinese open-source and US frontier models labs is fast diminishing or even closing. The latest large language model developed Moonshot AI has sent shockwaves through the global AI industry because of its frontier-level coding capabilities on some benchmarks.Story continues below this ad
Other Chinese AI models have also recently come into the spotlight. Silicon Valley leaders such as Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong and Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky have publicly spoken about their companies’ use of models such as Kimi, Z.ai’s GLM-5.2, and Alibaba’s Qwen.
Meanwhile, Anthropic and OpenAI have repeatedly called for stronger government regulation to help the US maintain its lead over China in the AI race.
