---
title: "Kimi K3 from Moonshot AI is now available on Databricks through Unity AI Gateway"
description: "Kimi K3 from Moonshot AI is now available on Databricks through the Foundation Model API and Unity AI Gateway, giving customers native access to an open-weight model alongside proprietary models from Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google Gemini. The announcement positions Kimi K3 as a frontier-quality option for coding, agentic reasoning, and document understanding, with deployment flexibility, customizability, and zero data retention coverage. Databricks says the model runs against governed enterprise data through Unity Catalog, while Unity AI Gateway provides permissions, safety guardrails, audit trails, spend controls, routing, and a standardized REST API within Databricks’ security perimeter. The post cites a score of 57 and rank of #4 in Artificial Analysis’ Intelligence Index, internal benchmarks showing performance at the level of leading proprietary models, and 50–72% lower cost per task; availability includes US hosting for AWS and GCP workspaces."
---

# Kimi K3 from Moonshot AI is now available on Databricks through Unity AI Gateway

[Databricks](https://yomu.fyi/company/databricks) · The Databricks Engineering Team · Aug 6, 2026

**Type:** Announcement

## Summary

Kimi K3 from Moonshot AI is now available on Databricks through the Foundation Model API and Unity AI Gateway, giving customers native access to an open-weight model alongside proprietary models from Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google Gemini. The announcement positions Kimi K3 as a frontier-quality option for coding, agentic reasoning, and document understanding, with deployment flexibility, customizability, and zero data retention coverage. Databricks says the model runs against governed enterprise data through Unity Catalog, while Unity AI Gateway provides permissions, safety guardrails, audit trails, spend controls, routing, and a standardized REST API within Databricks’ security perimeter. The post cites a score of 57 and rank of #4 in Artificial Analysis’ Intelligence Index, internal benchmarks showing performance at the level of leading proprietary models, and 50–72% lower cost per task; availability includes US hosting for AWS and GCP workspaces.

## Context

The announcement responds to the narrowing gap between open-weight and proprietary models and presents enterprise AI as requiring context, governance, model choice, and scalable cost. It frames Kimi K3 as an option for customers seeking quality alongside control, deployment flexibility, and lower operating costs.

## Approach / What changed

Databricks provides native Kimi K3 access through its Foundation Model API and governs it with Unity AI Gateway. The model can use governed enterprise data through Unity Catalog, while shared controls cover permissions, safety guardrails, audit trails, spend limits, model routing, standardized API access, and zero data retention.

## Takeaways

- Kimi K3 is available with US hosting on Databricks Foundation Model API for AWS and GCP workspaces.
- Unity AI Gateway applies access permissions, safety guardrails, audit logging, spend controls, and model routing across Kimi K3 and proprietary models.
- The post reports a rank of #4 and score of 57 in Artificial Analysis’ Intelligence Index, performance at the level of leading proprietary models in internal benchmarks, and 50–72% lower cost per task than comparable proprietary models.

**Tags:** [Databricks](https://yomu.fyi/topic/databricks), [LLMs](https://yomu.fyi/topic/llm), [Model Routing](https://yomu.fyi/topic/model-routing)

- Source: [Databricks](https://www.databricks.com/blog/kimi-k3-moonshot-ai-now-available-databricks-through-unity-ai-gateway)
- Source URL: https://www.databricks.com/blog/kimi-k3-moonshot-ai-now-available-databricks-through-unity-ai-gateway
- Ingested by Yomu: 2026-08-30T16:52:09.234Z

[Read original post](https://www.databricks.com/blog/kimi-k3-moonshot-ai-now-available-databricks-through-unity-ai-gateway)