Moonshot Is Creating New Winners and Losers in the AI Trade
The startup said Kimi K3 has strained its GPUs and forced it to pause new subscriptions while it adds capacity and tests new membership tiers.
- On Sunday, Chinese startup Moonshot temporarily paused new Kimi subscriptions after demand "received far more love" than expected, prioritizing compute for existing members to maintain service stability.
- Moonshot launched Kimi on Friday, calling it "Open Frontier Intelligence" and positioning it to rival models from Anthropic and OpenAI with capabilities for coding and reasoning tasks.
- Shares of Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp climbed 5.4% on Monday amid expectations of increased infrastructure spending, while developer Zhipu's shares plunged almost 40% in Hong Kong over two trading sessions.
- IG market analyst Tony Sycamore said $314 billion has been wiped from valuation estimates for two unlisted US firms, as investors draw comparisons with last year's "DeepSeek moment."
- Moonshot plans to release a full open-weight model on July 27, positioning memory suppliers like SK Hynix Inc and Samsung Electronics to benefit from sustained demand as advanced models require significantly more capacity.
34 Articles
34 Articles
Chinese startup Moonshot AI unveils new model, closing performance gap with U.S. rivals
CNBC's Kai Nicol-Schwarz discusses the release of a new AI model by Chinese startup Moonshot AI, which closes the gap with leading U.S. offerings and surpasses OpenAI and Anthropic’s most capable systems on some benchmarks. Kimi K3 still trails Anthropic’s Claude Fable 5 and OpenAI’s GPT 5.6 Sol on overall performance, the company said on Friday, but consistently outperformed other tested models.
The Chinese AI model Kimi K3 challenges OpenAI, Anthropic and Google with top performance at low prices. Developers are already changing suppliers, investors are talking about a turning point. The situation is also getting worse on the geopolitical front.
Demand for Chinese AI strains compute
Beijing-based AI phenom Moonshot paused new subscriptions for its new Kimi K3 model, underscoring the constraints Chinese tech firms face in delivering their products to a global audience. The open-source model, which has capabilities near those of the top American systems, caused an influx of demand that strained the startup’s computing power. Moonshot is reportedly also preparing for a Hong Kong IPO to capitalize on investor enthusiasm for Ch…
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