Moonshot AI Pauses New Subscriptions Amid Demand for Kimi K3

Moonshot AI has announced that it is temporarily pausing new subscriptions to its service. The reason: an unexpectedly high demand for the Kimi K3 model, which over the past 48 hours has come right up against the limit of available computing capacity.

In a statement posted on the social network X on July 19, 2026, the developers admitted that the new model had received “far more love than they expected,” and that their GPUs had felt it in full. To avoid degrading the service for those who have already paid for a subscription, the company decided to prioritize existing users.

The restriction does not apply to current subscribers—they are promised the same quality of service as before. Moonshot AI says it is scaling up capacity “as fast as it can” and will open new subscription slots in batches as free resources become available.

Splitting the subscriptions

At the same time, the company announced a restructuring of its pricing plans. The single subscription will be split into two more focused plans: Kimi Membership—for the web version, the app, and Kimi Work business scenarios—and Kimi Code Membership—for programming-related tasks.

The developers reason that this split will make it possible to allocate computing resources more precisely across different types of workload and to keep the service stable. Coding scenarios have traditionally required a different compute profile than ordinary conversational queries, so spinning them off into a separate plan looks like a logical step.

A situation in which an AI startup is forced to close its doors to new customers because of a GPU shortage has become a telling sign of the times: increasingly, the bottleneck for developing services built on large language models is not demand but access to computing capacity.

Source: Hacker News