Stocks and technology bets are still recovering from Friday. Moonshot AI’s Kimi K3, a Chinese open-weight model that took the top spot in a much-watched coding benchmark, sparked a semiconductor selloff that dragged crypto down with it to close last week.
Aftershocks rippled through Asia on Monday, with South Korea’s Kospi falling 3.5% as traders returned from their own vacations. US futures steadied, with the Nasdaq 100 up 0.5%, but the question raised by the release has not gone away.
For crypto, the two forces roughly cancel. War fueled oil is inflationary, which is bad for risk assets and for the case that the Federal Reserve keeps interest rates steady. Meanwhile, a Chinese model undercutting the AI trade is pushing the chip stocks that bitcoin has tended to track all month.
This week’s test is corporate, not macro. There are no major US financial releases, so the reading on the AI trade comes from earnings, with Alphabet reporting on Tuesday, Tesla on Wednesday and Intel on Thursday.
After last week’s wobbles in AI and semiconductor stocks, these results will determine whether the capex that underpins the sector and the miner-to-AI pivot driving it still bottoms out.
