Kimi K3 Open Weights Are Here: How to Self-Host the 2.8T-Parameter Model (Hardware, vLLM, and Data Sovereignty)

Moonshot AI, an Alibaba-backed startup, released the open weights for Kimi K3 on July 27. This 2.8-trillion-parameter Mixture-of-Experts model is the largest open-weight release ever shipped, designed to compete with US leaders like OpenAI and Anthropic. By publishing weights on Hugging Face, Moonshot AI allows organizations to self-host the model on their own infrastructure. Kimi K3 provides frontier-level reasoning capabilities and outperforms competitors on key developer benchmarks without requiring external API routing.