Is Yang Zhiqi, who is not in a hurry to go public, anxious about the popularity of Kimi K3 causing a “computing power shortage”?

After the popularity of Kimi K3, the dark side of the moon, known as one of the “AI Six Tigers”, encountered a “computing power shortage”.
Kimi
After K3 became popular, the dark side of the moon, known as one of the “AI Six Tigers”, encountered a “computing power shortage”.

On July 19th, the Kimi team on the dark side of the moon announced that due to unexpected computing power challenges, they have decided to temporarily suspend new user subscriptions on the C-end and invest all existing computing power into serving existing subscribers.

At the same time, the Kimi team stated that they have been pushing forward with full speed to expand their computing power. As new computing power is gradually introduced, more subscription quotas will be gradually opened until normal subscriptions are fully restored.

It is reported that Kimi K3 is a new generation model launched by the Dark Side of the Moon, with a parameter scale of 2.8 trillion, making it the world’s first open-source 3 trillion level large model.

The latest frontend development chart released by Arena shows that Kimi K3 scored 1679 points, surpassing Claude Fable 5’s 1631 points and GPT-5.6 Sol’s 1618 points, firmly winning the first place on the chart.

But the dark side of the moon also bluntly stated that the overall performance of Kimi K3 still lags behind the strongest closed source models Claude Fable 5 and GPT-5.6 Sol.

It is worth mentioning that Yang Zhilin, founder and CEO of Moon Dark Side, stated in an internal letter last year that the company has a cash holding of over 10 billion yuan and can raise a larger amount of funds from the primary market. “We are not in a hurry to go public in the short term

However, as we enter 2026, the company’s capital strategy undergoes a rapid shift. According to multiple media reports, the dark side of the moon has already sent a listing proposal to investors, and is expected to complete the Hong Kong stock listing within 6 months at the earliest.

Kimi encounters’ computing power shortage ‘, suspends new user subscriptions on the C-end
On July 19th, the Kimi team announced that since the release of Kimi K3, the company has received far more support than expected, but also faces unexpected computing power challenges – in the past 48 hours, the number of user requests has significantly exceeded the team’s estimates and is approaching the capacity limit of the existing cluster.

Therefore, in order to ensure the experience of existing subscribers, the team has decided to suspend the subscription of new C-end users from today onwards, and invest all existing computing power in serving existing subscribers, ensuring that all rights and interests of existing subscribers are not affected.

Faced with the problem of insufficient computing power, the Kimi team stated that the company is pushing forward with full speed to expand its computing power. As new computing power gradually arrives, it will gradually open up more subscription quotas until normal subscriptions are fully restored.

For future new subscribers, the Kimi team will split the Kimi main rights (including Kimi Web, Kimi App, Kimi Work) and Kimi Code rights to facilitate more accurate matching of computing power and ensure user experience.

According to Half Moon Talk Network, computing power is a new type of productivity that integrates information computing power, network carrying power, and data storage power. It is mainly divided into general computing power (general computing), intelligent computing power (intelligent computing), and supercomputing power (supercomputing).

Among them, intelligent computing power is mainly used for complex data analysis and artificial intelligence tasks. For a long time, there has been a structural contradiction in China’s computing power market, with a relative surplus of general computing power and a relative shortage of intelligent computing power.

In fact, not only the Kimi team, but also the problem of “computing power shortage” has become one of the important factors restricting the development of global large-scale models.

As early as January this year, Zhipu, the “first stock of big models”, issued a restricted sale announcement for GLM Coding Plan, stating that with the launch of GLM-4.7, the number of GLM Coding Plan users has experienced rapid growth, causing the company’s computing resources to face temporary shortages.

At that time, Zhipu announced that it would temporarily release the GLM Coding Plan in limited quantities, reducing the daily sales volume after sales to the current 20%, in order to free up more computing resources for Zhipu’s “old friends” and provide a smoother programming experience.

According to Caixin, in April of this year, MiniMax、Kimi、 Mainstream model manufacturers such as Zhipu have experienced API call overload or service interruption issues.

In addition to domestic big model players, overseas AI giants also face similar challenges. The Wall Street Journal reported in March that OpenAI was forced to shrink its business front and abandon its previously highly anticipated Sora video generation application due to tight computing power.

In addition, Anthropic, also a leading player in the industry, has faced frequent system crashes and a significant decline in service stability. In March of this year, Anthropic announced that it would limit the number of tokens that users could use during peak hours from 5am to 11am Pacific Time on weekdays.

Kimi K3 tops the frontend development chart, but overall performance still falls short
As the source of the “computing power shortage” on the dark side of the moon, the Kimi K3 has recently been in the limelight.

According to the Dark Side of the Moon, Kimi K3 is a 2.8 trillion parameter model built on the KDA hybrid linear attention mechanism (Kimi Delta Attention) and attention residuals technology, with native support for visual understanding and a 1 million token contextual window.

The dark side of the moon also stated that Kimi K3 is the world’s first open-source 3 trillion level model designed for cutting-edge intelligent scenarios such as long-range programming, knowledge work, and reasoning.

In terms of pricing, Kimi K3 adopts a pay as you go standard: input pricing is 20 yuan/million tokens (cache miss), 2 yuan/million tokens (cache hit), and output pricing is 100 yuan/million tokens.

According to NetEase Intelligence, in Arena’s updated frontend development ranking on July 16th, Kimi K3 ranked first with a high score of 1679, surpassing Claude Fable 5’s 1631 and GPT-5.6 Sol’s 1618.

Arena stated that in the front-end field, Kimi K3 ranks first in 6 out of 7 areas (brand and marketing, reference based design, data and analysis, consumer products, simulation, and content creation tools), only second in the gaming field, behind Fable 5.

The impressive test performance of Kimi K3 quickly sparked discussions overseas. Russia Salakhutdinov, the mentor of Yang Zhilin, the founder of the Dark Side of the Moon, posted a post praising the new version of Kimi for bringing significant breakthroughs to the open source community.

In addition, Tesla CEO Musk also exclaimed in the comments section of the relevant review report, ‘Impressive’.

However, Arena explicitly states that its ranking measures front-end web development tasks, including intelligent agent programming processes that require multi-step inference and tool invocation, rather than the overall capabilities of the model.

The dark side of the moon also admitted that the overall performance of Kimi K3 still lags behind the strongest closed source models Claude Fable 5 and GPT-5.6 Sol, but it demonstrates cutting-edge capabilities throughout the entire evaluation, consistently surpassing all other models.

The ranking released by independent evaluation agency Artificial Analysis confirms this statement: the intelligence index of Kimi K3 is 57 points, lower than Claude Fable 5’s 60 points and GPT-5.6 Sol’s 59 points, but higher than Opus 4.8’s 56 points.

Artificial Analysis also stated that compared to Kimi’s previous generation model, K3’s answer accuracy has increased from 33% to 46%, but its illusion rate has also increased from 39% to 51%.

It is worth mentioning that after the news of Kimi K3 topping the front-end development list was released, the US stock market ushered in the “DeepSeek Moment 2.0” – the AI sector evaporated a total of about $470 billion within 72 hours.

The 21st Century Business Herald pointed out that the core of the US stock market crash is that Kimi K3 has entered the lifeline of American tech giants: code generation is one of the largest tracks for AI commercialization, directly threatening the technological moat that overseas closed source giants rely on to maintain high pricing.

According to Artificial Analysis statistics, the average cost of running a task for Kimi K3 is 0.94 US dollars, which is in the same range as GPT-5.6 Sol’s 1.04 US dollars and only half of Opus 4.8.

Zhang Yutong, the President of Moon’s Dark Side, recently revealed that data shows that at the K3 release node on July 17th, the company’s annualized revenue (ARR) recorded the largest single day increase in history.

From ‘not in a hurry to go public’ to preparing for IPO
According to Tianyancha information, Beijing Moon Dark Face Technology Co., Ltd. (referred to as “Moon Dark Face”) was registered and established in April 2023, with Yang Zhilin as the actual controller of the company, holding 51.83% of the shares.

According to public information, Yang Zhilin graduated from Tsinghua University with a bachelor’s degree and Carnegie Mellon University with a PhD in computer science. He has worked at Google Brain and American startup FAIR. At the same time, it is also a technical contributor to the earliest large-scale models in China, such as “Pangu” and “Wudao”.

According to Yang Zhilin’s mentor, Russia Salakhutdinov, Yang Zhilin could have stayed in the United States to join Apple, but he still insisted on returning to China to start his own business. In his opinion, if he doesn’t even try to start his own company, he will regret it for the rest of his life.

Or perhaps due to his optimism towards Yang Zhilin, the establishment of the Moon Dark Side quickly attracted the attention of many capital.

According to Tianyancha, as early as June 2023, Moon’s Dark Side had received nearly 2 billion yuan in angel round investments from Sequoia China, ZhenFund, Today Capital, and Lixi Capital.

The following month, the dark side of the month completed its Series A financing, with investors including Lanchi Venture Capital, Xianghe Capital, and Meituan Dragon Ball.

At the beginning of 2024, Moonlit completed an A+round financing of over $1 billion, and the company’s valuation reached $2.5 billion.

Afterwards, the dark side of the moon successively completed over $300 million in Series B financing and $500 million in Series C financing.

According to LatePost, Yang Zhilin revealed in an internal letter in 2025 that from September to November last year, the average MoM growth of its overseas and domestic paying users exceeded 170%. As of the end of the year, the company had over 10 billion yuan in cash reserves.

Yang Zhilin frankly stated that compared to the secondary market, he believes that he can raise a larger amount of funds from the primary market, so he is not in a hurry to go public in the short term.

The fact is indeed true. Since the beginning of this year, the dark side of the moon has completed three rounds of financing, and the company’s valuation has exceeded 20 billion US dollars.

However, Yang Zhilin’s attitude of “not in a hurry to go public” is quietly changing. In May of this year, Phoenix WEEKLY quoted Bloomberg as saying that the dark side of the month had notified shareholders to officially launch the dismantling of VIE and red chip structures, clearing obstacles for IPO in Hong Kong.

According to analysis, this move means that the company has entered the IPO preparation period. Huang Lichong, President of Huisheng International Capital, stated that dismantling VIEs and red chips essentially involves placing control rights, responsible parties, and regulatory boundaries in a clearer position.

Huang Lichong’s analysis suggests that if everything goes smoothly, it could be a six-month to one-year window; If regulatory, shareholder, tax, and foreign investment arrangements are complex, they may take longer.

Shortly after the release of the Kimi K3, the launch plan for the Dark Side of the Moon also saw new progress. According to the Daily Economic News on July 20th, the dark side of the month has sent a listing proposal to investors, and it is expected to be listed on the Hong Kong stock market within six months at the earliest.

The report also mentioned that in June of this year, the annual recurring revenue (ARR) of the dark side of the month had reached 300 million US dollars, and achieved several fold growth after the release of the K3 model. The company believes that the time is ripe for going public.

However, the dark side of the moon has not yet made a public response on the latest listing schedule, nor has it publicly disclosed specific progress such as application submission and overseas listing filing.

It is worth mentioning that on June 29th, the dark side of the moon published an article stating that there have been multiple cases of false financing and equity trading information in the market using the company’s name recently, and the company has discovered that some institutions and individuals are suspected of fraud.

Regarding this, the dark side of the moon made a solemn statement on relevant matters: all financing activities of the company are directly responsible by the company; The transfer of the company’s old shares (including common shares, incentive shares, etc.) must be approved internally by the company before proceeding; The allocation of financing quotas for the company’s new shares is based on the actual receipt of funds.