Kimi K3's weights are free. The 64 GPUs to run them aren't.

Moonshot AI released the weights for Kimi K3 on 27 July — 2.8 trillion parameters, native vision, a 1M-token context window, and the largest open-weight model anyone has shipped. Free to download. Also free to discover you can't actually run it.

The architecture is a Stable LatentMoE stack activating 16 of 896 experts, built on Kimi Delta Attention, for roughly 2.5× the scaling efficiency of K2. But all 896 experts have to sit in memory at once, which puts the weights somewhere between ~600GB and 1.4TB depending on precision. Moonshot's own deployment guidance is a supernode with 64+ accelerators — at typical cloud rates that's ~$250/hour, north of $6,000 a day, before a single token gets served.

Meanwhile the hosted API runs $3 per million input tokens ($0.30 on cache hits) and $15 per million output. The crossover where owning the metal beats renting the endpoint sits somewhere past a billion tokens a month — which is to say, not you.

Why it matters: open weights are quietly moving the moat from model access to the capital required to serve them — "open" now means auditable, not affordable.