After Kimi K3 Launch, U.S. AI Stocks Wipe Out $470 Billion in Market Value; Silicon Valley Stunned by Speed of China's AI Rise

China's open-source AI models are forcing Wall Street to reevaluate the landscape of AI competition. According to recent statistics, since Moonshot AI launched its flagship large language model Kimi K3, there has been a broad sell-off across U.S. AI-related equities, wiping out approximately $470 billion (about NT$15 trillion) in combined market value.

According to Fast Technology, 17 Wall Street investment banks revised their target prices for AI chipmakers overnight. JPMorgan stated in a report that the launch of Kimi K3 is 'adding insult to injury' for AI chip stocks.

A Goldman Sachs partner suggested that the era of compute expansion may be coming to an end. If low-cost open-source models from China deliver strong performance, the justification for the massive capital expenditures made by U.S. AI giants becomes questionable.

Silicon Valley is also stunned by the rapid pace of China's AI rise. Ion Stoica, professor at the University of California, Berkeley, noted that the gap between China's open-source models and the U.S. frontier has shrunk from six months to just two or three months. Elon Musk, founder of Tesla, also left a notable comment under a related evaluation post.

Kimi K3 topped the authoritative front-end programming leaderboard, Frontend Code Arena, scoring 1679 points—surpassing Anthropic's Claude Fable 5 at 1631 and OpenAI's GPT-5.6 Sol at 1618. This marks the first time an open-source model has outperformed all major overseas closed-source models on a recognized benchmark.

To date, Chinese open-source models have accumulated over 10 billion downloads, leading globally. For every 10 large model downloads worldwide, 6 are from models developed in China.

On the global mainstream large model API call leaderboard, the top six models are all developed by Chinese teams. In the past 12 months, domestically developed Chinese models have maintained the scale ceiling for open-source models for nine months.

Notably, less than two weeks after the launch of Kimi K3, Moonshot AI completed its Series F financing on Wednesday, July 29, raising over $3.5 billion, bringing its post-money valuation to $35 billion.