Moonshot AI introduced Kimi K3 on July 17 as fresh “evidence” that Chinese developers could approach the AI frontier at lower advertised prices. Nvidia Corporation (NASDAQ:NVDA) and Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) may be better positioned for that world than the labs financing the model race. Kimi Is Not as Cheap as It Looks Against All Frontier ModelsK3’s API costs $3 per million input tokens and $15 per million output tokens. On the same standardized workload, K3 generated roughly 25,000 output tokens per task, including about 18,000 internal reasoning tokens, while GPT-5.6 Sol used 15,000 output tokens in total. If model prices fall while usage grows, Microsoft can still monetize the underlying compute and distribution.