Bets on stocks and technology continue to rally since Friday. Moonshot AI’s Kimi K3, a Chinese open-weight model that took first place in a widely watched coding benchmark, sparked a semiconductor selloff that dragged the crypto lower until it closed last week.
The aftershock hit Asia on Monday, with South Korea’s Kospi falling 3.5% as traders returned from vacation. US futures stabilized, with the Nasdaq 100 up 0.5%, but the issue raised by the publication did not go away.
For cryptography, the two forces roughly cancel each other out. War-induced oil is inflationary, which is bad for risky assets and in case the Federal Reserve keeps rates steady. Meanwhile, a Chinese model that undercuts AI trading is putting pressure on chip stocks that Bitcoin has been trending all month.
The test of the week concerns businesses, not macroeconomics. There are no major U.S. economic releases, so the AI trade numbers come from earnings, with Alphabet reporting on Tuesday, Tesla on Wednesday and Intel on Thursday.
After last week’s swings in AI and semiconductor stocks, these results will determine whether capital spending supporting the sector, and the resulting pivot from mining to AI, still has a floor.
