> Are they really that good,

They did exceed the expecations of pretty much everyone! I've also blogged about using the model, it's a bit on the slow side but pretty good!

> so were totally surprised and overwhelmed by the requests ... or do they just don't have the hardware being in china?

Yes, this is mostly the case: https://x.com/Kimi_Moonshot/status/2078855608565207130

As a user, I much prefer that to service disruptions or severely degraded or secretly quantized performance. However if I didn't have an account, I'd be pretty pissed off about not being able to give them money and become a user.

Since the model is open-weights, you can get from other providers, for example see https://openrouter.ai/moonshotai/kimi-k3#providers

No, the waiting list is true.

Kimi had become that popular. I was a subscriber of Kimi back when latest version was Kimi K2. Later I unsubscribed because I jumped over to GLM subscription (they had amazing deal). Now when I wanted to try out Kimi K3 to find out what the fuzz was all about, I couldn’t subscribe to them.

I remember reading a post from Moonshot team about this, they are doing this because they are almost at peak capacity and want to reserve it to keep the quality for their current customers.

We are actually witnessing an open-weight model catching up at catching mainstream users attention. And instead of behaving like Anthropic, they actually care about their users experience.

It's an extremely popular model hosted by a company affected by hardware export bans. I doubt they'd voluntarily prevent people from subscribing if they didn't absolutely have to to maintain service quality.