Bets on equities and technology continue to recover since Friday. Moonshot AI’s Kimi K3, a Chinese openweight model that ranked first in a widely watched coding benchmark, triggered a semiconductor sell-off that dragged cryptocurrencies to the close last week.
The aftershock swept across Asia on Monday, with South Korea’s Kospi falling 3.5% as traders returned from their own vacations. US futures stabilized, with the Nasdaq 100 rising 0.5%, but the question the publication raised has not gone away.
For cryptocurrencies, the two forces roughly cancel out. War-driven oil is inflationary, which is bad for risk assets and for the Fed to keep rates stable. Meanwhile, a Chinese model undermining AI trading puts pressure on chip stocks that Bitcoin has tended to follow all month.
The test of the week is corporate, not macro. There are no major US economic releases, so the reading on AI trading comes from earnings: Alphabet will report on Tuesday, Tesla on Wednesday, and Intel on Thursday.
After last week’s wobble in AI and semiconductor stocks, those results will determine whether the capital spending underpinning the sector, and the pivot from mining to the AI that relies on it, still has a floor.
