Moonshot AI's Kimi K3 Sparks $30B Valuation Race

A year ago, most investors outside China hadn't heard of Moonshot AI. This week, the Beijing startup wiped billions off chipmakers' market caps and dragged bitcoin below $63,000 with a single model release.

Moonshot released Kimi K3 on July 16, a 2.8-trillion-parameter open-weight model built on a sparse mixture-of-experts design that activates just 16 of its 896 experts per task.

On a closely watched coding leaderboard, it topped offerings from Anthropic and OpenAI, though it still trails the newest flagship models from both companies on broader benchmarks. Full open weights are due July 27.

Traders dubbed it a "Kimi moment", echoing DeepSeek's 2025 debut, which erased roughly $600 billion from Nvidia's market value in a single session.

Chip and AI stocks slid across Asia and Wall Street, while bitcoin, ether and other major cryptocurrencies fell as investors treated the release as a fresh challenge to assumptions about US compute dominance.

Moonshot's valuation has increased from $4.3 billion at the end of 2025 to a value exceeding $20 billion, and reports have emerged suggesting further negotiations which would see their value pushed up to $30 billion.

In the last half-year alone, the company has managed to raise close to $3.9 billion thanks to investments made by companies such as Alibaba, Tencent, China Mobile and Meituan.

In an interview done back in December, the founder Yang Zhilin stated that the company was sitting on over 10 billion RMB worth of cash ($1.4 billion) and was not in any hurry to go public. After five months, Moonshot was partnering with China International Capital Corporation and Goldman Sachs to list its shares in Hong Kong.

As a means of meeting regulatory requirements, Moonshot has assured their investors that they will dissolve their VIE and red-chip structures registered in the Cayman Islands, opting for a joint venture structure that will ensure the dollar-denominated investors remain in the deal.