What is Kimi K2 good for?

Agent coding and tool-driven work, which Moonshot aimed the 0905 update at. Its Modified MIT weights allow commercial self-hosting, on a multi-GPU node.

When is Kimi K2 not a good fit?

New deployments: Moonshot retired it in May 2026 and Kimi K2.5 carries the line on. Text only, and running it yourself takes a multi-GPU node.

What is the cheapest way to run Kimi K2?

Hosted, unless you push serious volume. Novita charges $0.57 in / $2.30 out per 1M tokens. The cheapest rental that fits is 8x A100 at $10,138 a month, which costs the same as about 12B tokens a month on that API.

How does Kimi K2 compare with Kimi K2.5?

Moonshot built Kimi K2.5 by continuing pretraining on the Kimi K2 base with mixed image and text tokens, which adds vision input, instant and thinking modes, and a swarm mode that splits a task across many sub-agents. Same 262K-token context. Kimi K2 costs 43% more per 1M input tokens and 12% less per 1M output tokens than Kimi K2.5, at each model's cheapest listed provider. It came out 6 months earlier and takes no image and video input, which Kimi K2.5 does.

Can I self-host Kimi K2?

Yes. The weights are Modified MIT licensed. At 4-bit it needs about 554 GB of GPU memory, which starts at roughly $10,138 a month on the cheapest rental that fits.

Retired May 2026 Open weights · Modified MIT

Kimi K2

Moonshot AI's 1T-parameter MoE model with 32B active, released July 2025 and pre-trained on 15.5T tokens, with enhanced agentic coding in the 0905 update.

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Cheapest via Novita

Input: $0.57 /1M tokens
Output: $2.30 /1M tokens

2 providers

Key Specifications

Context window: 262K tokens
Released: Jul 2025
Parameters: 1T, 32B active
Inputs: Text

Capabilities Show details: Function calling Connect to external tools, APIs, and systems. Structured output Return responses in structured formats like JSON. Web search Search the web for up-to-date information.

Hosted API pricing

Input tokens M Output tokens M

Provider	Input /1M tokens	Output /1M tokens	Cost at 10M in + 2M out
Novita	$0.57	$2.30	$10.30	View
Moonshot AI Creator	Open weights, no hosted price			View

Heads up: Base-tier, on-demand rates per 1M tokens; cached, batch and long-context tiers excluded. A provider may serve a shorter context or a quantized build than the creator's release. Verify before provisioning. More on how we price.

Estimated cost to self-host

Kimi K2 needs about 554 GB of GPU memory at 4-bit with 32K context. The cheapest rental that fits is 8× A100 at about $10,138 a month.

That costs the same as roughly 12B tokens a month on Novita's API. Self-hosting is more expensive below that volume.

Single node ≤ 8

Precision	Memory	Cheapest fit (32K context)(Full 262K context)	Cost /mo	Break-even vs API
4-bitINT4 / FP4	554 GB570 GB	8× A100	$10,138$10,138	12B tokens /mo12B tokens /mo
8-bitFP8 / INT8	1,003 GB1,011 GB	4× B300	$22,723$22,723	26B tokens /mo26B tokens /mo
16-bitFP16 / BF16	2,004 GB2,020 GB	8× B300	$45,446$45,446	53B tokens /mo53B tokens /mo

Estimates based on median on-demand rates for Nvidia GPUs. Memory is weights plus KV cache for one request, using FP8 KV cache where supported and FP16/BF16 otherwise. Break-even assumes a 5:1 input-to-output ratio. No guarantee of runtime support, usable performance, or that a matching quantized build exists. How we estimate costs.

Similarly priced models

The models nearest Kimi K2 by blended rate, each at its own cheapest provider.

Model	Blended /1M	Input /1M	Output /1M	Context	Cutoff	vs Kimi K2
GPT-3.5 Turbo OpenAI	$0.6667	$0.50	$1.50	16K	Sep 2021	−22%
Mistral Large 3 Mistral	$0.6667	$0.50	$1.50	256K		−22%
Qwen3.5-Plus Alibaba Cloud	$0.7333	$0.40	$2.40	1M		−15%
GLM-5 Z.AI	$0.7667	$0.60	$1.60	200K		−11%
DeepSeek R1 Distill Llama 70B DeepSeek	$0.80	$0.80	$0.80	131K		−7%
Kimi K2 This model Moonshot AI	$0.8583	$0.57	$2.30	262K
GLM-4.7 Z.AI	$0.8667	$0.60	$2.20	205K		+1%
Gemini 3 Flash Preview Google Cloud	$0.9167	$0.50	$3.00	1M	Jan 2025	+7%
Qwen3.6-Plus Alibaba Cloud	$0.9167	$0.50	$3.00	1M		+7%
GLM-5.2 Z.AI	$0.95	$0.70	$2.20	1M		+11%
Nemotron 3 Ultra 550B A55B Nvidia	$0.99	$0.66	$2.64	1M	Sep 2025	+15%

Prices are USD per 1M tokens at each model's cheapest listed provider. Blended is the cost of 10M input plus 2M output tokens, spread over the 12M.

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Frequently Asked Questions

What is Kimi K2 good for?: Agent coding and tool-driven work, which Moonshot aimed the 0905 update at. Its Modified MIT weights allow commercial self-hosting, on a multi-GPU node.
When is Kimi K2 not a good fit?: New deployments: Moonshot retired it in May 2026 and Kimi K2.5 carries the line on. Text only, and running it yourself takes a multi-GPU node.
What is the cheapest way to run Kimi K2?: Hosted, unless you push serious volume. Novita charges $0.57 in / $2.30 out per 1M tokens. The cheapest rental that fits is 8x A100 at $10,138 a month, which costs the same as about 12B tokens a month on that API.
How does Kimi K2 compare with Kimi K2.5?: Moonshot built Kimi K2.5 by continuing pretraining on the Kimi K2 base with mixed image and text tokens, which adds vision input, instant and thinking modes, and a swarm mode that splits a task across many sub-agents. Same 262K-token context. Kimi K2 costs 43% more per 1M input tokens and 12% less per 1M output tokens than Kimi K2.5, at each model's cheapest listed provider. It came out 6 months earlier and takes no image and video input, which Kimi K2.5 does.
Can I self-host Kimi K2?: Yes. The weights are Modified MIT licensed. At 4-bit it needs about 554 GB of GPU memory, which starts at roughly $10,138 a month on the cheapest rental that fits.

More from Moonshot AI

Model	Context	Input /1M	Output /1M
Kimi K2 Thinking Open weights	262K	$0.60	$2.50
Kimi K2.5 Open weights	262K	$0.40	$2.60
Kimi K2.6 Open weights	262K	$0.60	$3.20
Kimi K2.7 Code Open weights	262K	$0.90	$3.75
Kimi K3 Open weights	1M	$2.00	$12.00