Chinese AI model Kimi K3 temporarily halted new sign-ups after a surge of requests quickly saturated its capacity, its developer Moonshot AI announced. The pause came just days after the public launch of the model, which aims to compete with players like Anthropic and OpenAI.
Rapid adoption outstrips capacity
Beijing-based Moonshot AI said on X that “Kimi K3 has received far more attention than expected” and that “over the past 48 hours, demand pushed us close to the limits of our current capacity.” The company said it will prioritize existing subscribers and temporarily suspend new customer sign-ups, while adding capacity “as fast as possible” and reopening slots in waves.
Technical demands and operational consequences
Kimi K3 contains 2.8 trillion parameters, a size presented as making it the largest open-source model in the world. That scale and performance place heavy demands on compute resources, a constraint highlighted by Lian Jye Su, chief analyst at Omdia: “New model releases typically trigger massive interest that can put existing compute infrastructure under severe strain.” According to him, Moonshot likely did not anticipate the magnitude of the popularity spike and is now confronting significant operational and infrastructure constraints.
