China just dropped an AI model so good it erased $590 billion off Nvidia in a day

Kimi K3 is free to download, runs about 70% cheaper than Claude per token, and it just proved open-weight AI doesn't mean second-rate anymore. Aliteq Lena Fischer · AI & Local Compute Editor

Moonshot AI released full open weights for Kimi K3, a 2.8-trillion-parameter mixture-of-experts model, on July 27, 2026, after launching it July 16.

Nvidia's market cap fell by roughly $590 billion in a single trading session following the announcement, with Taiwan's benchmark down over 6% and the Nasdaq down 1.5%.

Kimi K3 costs $15 per million output tokens through Moonshot's API — about 70% less than Anthropic's roughly $50 per million for a comparable model.

Only about 104 billion of the model's 2.8 trillion parameters activate per token (16 of 896 experts), which is why Moonshot says it's dramatically cheaper to run than its size suggests.

Cursor, Coinbase, DoorDash and other US companies have already adopted Kimi or rival Chinese models to cut AI costs, and Chinese-built models captured 57% of tokens used by US firms on OpenRouter in…

I think the market reaction was overcorrected for one afternoon and directionally right for the next five years. Kimi K3 isn't a better model than Claude Fable 5 or GPT-5.6 Sol — Moonshot's own…

I don't think this is a fluke

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