The Chinese AI Model That Wiped Hundreds Of Billions Off Nvidia Just Made Its Creator Worth $35B

Chinese AI startup Moonshot AI reportedly raised $3.5 billion, well above its original target, valuing the company at $35 billion.

• Moonshot’s Kimi K3 debut earlier this month triggered a broad selloff in AI semiconductor stocks.
• The startup is facing scrutiny from U.S. officials over allegations that it trained Kimi K3 using restricted Nvidia chips and relied partly on AI model distillation.
• The company is reportedly seeking greater access to Nvidia's Blackwell GPUs to develop its next-generation Kimi K4 model.

The same AI model that wiped billions off Nvidia's (NVDA) market value earlier this month has now made its own creator, Chinese startup Moonshot AI, worth $35 billion. 

According to a report by Bloomberg, Moonshot closed a $3.5 billion funding round, far exceeding the $1 billion to $2 billion it initially targeted, as investors piled in following the launch of its Kimi K3 model, according to people familiar with the matter.

Moonshot released Kimi K3 earlier this month. The 2.8 trillion-parameter model was the largest open-weight AI system ever released, with performance approaching frontier models from Anthropic and OpenAI at roughly half the API cost. 

Chip stocks took a dive, with Nvidia, Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), Broadcom (AVGO, and Micron (MU) taking some of the biggest hits. The drawdown has led to Nvidia losing its position as the world's most valuable company to Apple (AAPL) amid the selloff. 

So far this month, Nvidia’s valuation has come down from a peak of over $5.1 trillion to around $4.7 trillion as of Tuesday’s close. NVDA stock edged higher in pre-market trade on Wednesday amid a broader recovery in the technology sector. The Nasdaq-100 tracking Invesco QQQ Trust (QQQ) moved 0.24% higher. On Stockwits, retail sentiment around NVDA shares remained in ‘neutral’ territory over the past day, accompanied by chatter at ‘high’ levels. 

Moonshot AI Reportedly Wants Nvidia's Blackwell Chips

The White House has accused Moonshot of training Kimi K3 on restricted Nvidia chips, obtained in violation of U.S. export controls, and reiterated allegations that the model was built in part through "distillation," extracting outputs from rival AI systems to boost its own performance. 

According to a report by The Information,  Moonshot AI is reportedly seeking greater access to Nvidia's Blackwell processors to train its next-generation Kimi K4 large language model, a successor to the recently launched Kimi K3.

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