Moonshot's Kimi K3 debut seen as AI's next 'DeepSeek Moment'

The launch of Moonshot AI’s Kimi K3 marks a global industry watershed and another "DeepSeek moment", signaling that Chinese models have entered the global narrative as a competitive threat, analysts said. 

K3's hybrid pricing of US$2.3 (HK$17.94) per million tokens set a new high for domestic models, exceeding Qwen 3.7 Max's US$1.4 and Zhipu GLM 5.2's US$0.9. Goldman Sachs noted that the sharp drop in the share prices of listed competitors Zhipu AI (2513) and MiniMax (0100) last Friday reflected market concerns over pricing volatility and the sustainability of domestic model leadership. 

In the cloud and data center sector, Goldman Sachs remains optimistic about Alibaba (9988), GDS (9698), 21Vianet, and Kingsoft Cloud (3896); in the AI ​​model field, it emphasizes MiniMax, mainly because its risk-reward ratio has significant upside potential. 

On the other hand, the release of K3 triggered panic in the US technology sector, putting downward pressure on hardware and infrastructure stocks. Malik Ahmed Khan, senior equity analyst at independent Wall Street research firm Morningstar, pointed out that while K3 performed exceptionally well in benchmark tests, open-source models have a history of benchmark optimization to artificially inflate scores. He expressed skepticism over whether K3 can truly compete on par with Anthropic's Fable 5 in real-world tasks.

As of 4 pm Monday, MiniMax's stock price fell 11.83 percent in a single day, while Zhipu AI dropped 19.56 percent. 

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