#MoonshotAIPreIPOs开启 Behind Kimi’s $3.5 billion financing: The valuation logic of the foundation-model sector is being restructured
In August 2026, a financing announcement once again set China’s AI industry abuzz.
Moonshot AI announced the completion of its Series F financing, raising more than $3.5 billion and reaching a post-money valuation of $35 billion. Even more strikingly, the Pre-IPO round originally planned to launch in August has already started ahead of schedule, with the market-reported target pre-money valuation soaring to $50 billion.
What does this mean? A Chinese foundation-model company founded just over three years ago now has a valuation higher than that of the vast majority of A-share listed companies. From the $4.3 billion valuation in its Series C at the end of last year to its current push toward $50 billion, its valuation has multiplied more than tenfold in just over half a year.
Many people cannot understand it: How can an AI company that is still making massive investments and has yet to turn a profit be worth so much?
Today, let’s discuss what exactly happened behind Kimi’s latest financing round.
I. The phenomenon: Capital is voting with its money—and moving fast
First, let’s look at the fundamentals of this financing round.
According to media reports, Moonshot AI’s Series F financing exceeded $3.5 billion, with the National Artificial Intelligence Industry Investment Fund and Alibaba jointly leading the round. Because subscriptions exceeded the original target by more than three times, the company directly closed the subscription window ahead of schedule. This is not a normal financing pace. From the Series C at the end of 2025, to three consecutive rounds of financing in early 2026, to the $2 billion Series D led by Meituan Longzhu in May, and then the Series F in July, Moonshot AI completed multiple large-scale financing rounds in less than a year. Its cumulative financing has already far exceeded that of the vast majority of Chinese AI startups. Even more noteworthy is its shareholder structure. Alibaba, the National Social Security Fund, China Mobile, CITIC Industrial Fund, Meituan Longzhu… Put together, these names include internet giants, national-team funds, and industrial capital. This is not merely a venture-capital bet, but the entire Chinese technology industry betting on the future of foundation models. The same is true elsewhere. Zhipu and MiniMax have successively listed in Hong Kong, with their market capitalizations repeatedly reaching new highs; DeepSeek’s valuation also surpassed $50 billion after raising financing. China’s top-tier foundation-model companies are collectively entering the “capital finals.”
II. The turning point: The release of Kimi K3 gave the valuation a new narrative
Capital is willing to provide money on the premise that it sees potential. In July 2026, Moonshot AI released its next-generation flagship model, Kimi K3. This was not an ordinary version update. K3 has 2.8 trillion parameters and uses a mixture-of-experts (MoE) architecture, activating only 16 routed experts at a time, for 104 billion actively activated parameters. It supports an ultralong context of 1 million Tokens, offers native visual understanding, and is fully open-sourced. On Artificial Analysis’s globally authoritative Intelligence Index, K3’s overall score ranked just behind Anthropic’s Claude Fable 5 and OpenAI’s GPT-5.6, placing it among the top three worldwide. On the day of its release, K3 surged to first place on Hugging Face’s global trending chart. Forty-eight hours later, user request volume approached the cluster’s capacity limit, forcing Moonshot AI to announce the suspension of new consumer subscriptions and prioritize all computing power for existing paid users. The last time a product became so popular that its company had to “rate-limit” it was when ChatGPT had just launched. But K3’s significance goes beyond impressive technical specifications. More importantly, it gave the market a fresh understanding of Moonshot AI’s technological potential. After DeepSeek emerged with high performance at low cost, many people were asking: What differentiated advantages does Kimi still have? K3’s answer is that Kimi remains competitive on three key battlegrounds: long context, multimodality, and the open-source ecosystem.
III. The confidence: Commercialization has turned from a “story” into “numbers”
Even excellent technology is merely a laboratory toy if it cannot be monetized. The real anchor behind Moonshot AI’s valuation surge this round is its commercialization data. In March 2026, the company’s annual recurring revenue (ARR) surpassed $100 million. In May, it surpassed $200 million. By mid-June, it surpassed $300 million. It tripled in three months. More importantly, the revenue structure. API revenue now accounts for more than 70% of total revenue, with enterprise customers becoming the primary source of income. This means Kimi is no longer merely a consumer-facing application for users to chat and ask questions, but is becoming enterprise-level AI infrastructure. Enterprises’ willingness to pay and retention are far higher than those of individual users. Growth in API calls brings predictable, sustainable cash flow.
According to media reports, Kimi’s overseas paying users grew 400%, API revenue grew 400%, and the product has entered more than 200 countries and regions. One customer even offered a tens-of-millions-of-dollars spending commitment and prepaid guarantee solely to secure priority API access.

#股票交易分享挑战 AMD's Best Earnings Report Ever, Yet Shares Plunge 9%: The Market Wants Acceleration, Not Good Results
AMD delivered an earnings report that was nearly flawless, yet its stock plunged more than 9% after hours. This was not the fault of its performance, but rather a fundamental shift in how capital markets price "AI No. 2"—when Nvidia's $5.33 trillion market capitalization has defined the absolute standard for AI chips, AMD's "better-than-expected" results are no longer enough. The market wants to see it "surpass Nvidia."
The Data Shines Blindingly, While the Stock Falls Decisively
After the market closed on August 4, AMD released its fiscal 2026 second-quarter earnings: total revenue of $53.3k, up 50% year over year and a record high; non-GAAP earnings per share of $1.66, above the market expectation of $1.62; and data center revenue of $11.54B, surging 107% year over year and accounting for 58% of the company's total revenue.
However, AMD shares fell more than 10% at one point in after-hours trading, ultimately closing down more than 9%. The trigger for the sell-off was its Q3 revenue guidance: the company expects third-quarter revenue of approximately $13 billion, plus or minus $300 million. Although this is above Wall Street's average expectation of $12.5 billion, it is below the most optimistic forecasts—several leading institutions had previously made aggressive bets on $13.5-14 billion, leaving a clear expectation gap around the $13 billion midpoint.
The paradox of "earnings beating expectations, guidance also beating expectations, yet the stock plunging" exposes the core contradiction facing AI chip stocks today: valuations have already priced in a perfect narrative, and any signal falling short of the "most optimistic expectations" will be amplified as negative news. AMD's stock has risen more than 130% this year, with its 52-week range spanning $149 to $584. What is priced into that gain is the expectation of "catching up with Nvidia," not the reality of being "better than last quarter."
Nvidia's Shadow: $5.33 Trillion vs. the Ceiling for the ChallengerNvidia holds approximately 80%-90% of the AI data center GPU market, and its data center revenue in the most recent fiscal year was approximately $194 billion—more than 11 times AMD's entire data center business.
On August 5, Nvidia shares rose 4% against the broader trend, bringing its total market capitalization to $5.33 trillion, a two-month high, marking five consecutive days of gains. AMD has certainly made progress. Q2 data center revenue reached $6.7 billion, up 107% year over year and setting a record for the fifth consecutive quarter; cloud and enterprise sales of its server CPUs (EPYC) both grew more than 70% year over year; and shipments of Instinct AI accelerators reached another record high. Su Zifeng even gave her most aggressive long-term guidance to date: data center revenue is expected to "more than double" in 2027, while server CPU revenue growth is expected to exceed 80%.
But capital markets have never priced AMD based on "how good it is" in isolation, but on "how far it is from Nvidia." When Nvidia hit a new share-price high and its market cap reached $5.33 trillion on the same day, AMD's after-hours plunge formed a brutal mirror image—the market is not buying AMD's absolute growth, but rather an option on "the Nvidia challenger." Once that narrative develops a crack, the option's value rapidly shrinks.
The Overlooked Structural Crack: Gaming Revenue Plunges 31%
Under the spotlight of its data center business, another traditional pillar of AMD is collapsing. Q2 gaming revenue was just $779 million, plunging 31% year over year and making it the smallest of the company's four major business segments, even below embedded revenue of $977 million. AMD attributed the decline to "lower semi-custom revenue"—that is, shrinking orders for consoles such as Xbox Series X/S, PS5, and Steam Deck as they approach the end of their life cycles.
More notably, CFO Hu Jin explicitly warned on the earnings call that gaming revenue would continue to see a "substantial double-digit decline" in the second half of the year. This means AMD is undergoing a dramatic restructuring of its business mix—from the traditional model of "dual-engine growth driven by CPUs and GPUs, with gaming and data centers given equal weight" to a single-engine model dominated by data centers, with gaming marginalized. The risk of this transformation is that once data center growth slows—even if only the growth rate decelerates—AMD will lack a second growth curve to provide a buffer.
By comparison, although Nvidia is also downplaying its gaming business, the absolute scale of its data center business and the depth of customer lock-in provided by the CUDA ecosystem offer a much stronger margin of safety. AMD's "all-in on AI" strategy is opening up more upside while simultaneously compressing its margin for error.Industry Blind Spot: The Double Squeeze from OpenAI's Defection and the Wave of In-House Chip DevelopmentAMD's challenges do not come solely from Nvidia. In late July, OpenAI confirmed that it would deploy AMD Helios computing racks on a large scale and jointly develop the next-generation MI500 series AI chips, which are expected to launch officially in 2027.
This may appear bullish, but it conceals a risk—when a super-customer like OpenAI works closely with both AMD and Nvidia, AMD gains not an exclusive order but "backup supplier certification." An even more fundamental threat comes from the wave of in-house chip development downstream. On August 5, Anthropic confirmed that it was forming an internal chip team for Claude and adopting a "multi-chip" strategy to support model expansion.
Previously, Google's TPU, Amazon's Trainium, and Microsoft's Maia had already been deployed. According to industry data, Google's TPU v7 has demonstrated strong competitiveness in inference costs, while Nvidia's share of the AI accelerator market fell from more than 90% to approximately 75%-78% in 2026. This means AMD faces a "sandwich predicament": above it, it must challenge Nvidia's CUDA ecosystem moat; below it, it must contend with customers' in-house chips replacing standardized GPUs. Su Zifeng's goal of doubling data center revenue in 2027 assumes that AMD can achieve generational performance parity with Nvidia's B-series/Rubin platforms through the MI500 series, while the developer stickiness of the ROCm ecosystem must make a substantive breakthrough—yet there is little visible evidence of either in the short term.
Outlook
AMD's plunge is not the end, but rather a microcosm of AI chip stocks shifting from "narrative-driven" to "performance-delivery-driven." Over the next 6-12 months, the key variables determining AMD's share-price direction will not be Q3 or Q4 revenue figures, but two deeper questions: Can MI500 truly achieve performance parity with Nvidia's equivalent products in 2027? Can the ROCm ecosystem evolve from "usable" to "easy to use" and break CUDA's hold over developers?
If the answers to these two questions remain unclear in the second half of 2026, AMD's valuation premium will remain under pressure. Conversely, if the deployment share of AMD products among major customers such as OpenAI and Meta rises substantially, the stock will recover quickly. In the short term, the gap between the Q3 guidance midpoint of around $130 and the market's aggressive expectation of $13.5-14 billion may require 1-2 quarters of better-than-expected performance to close. #AMD $AMD ‌

#GateLaunches10AShareContracts
Gate Expands Contract Trading with 10 Chinese Stock Futures: A New Era for Global Traders
The financial markets are evolving at an unprecedented pace, and exchanges that continuously innovate are shaping the future of global investing. Gate has taken another major step forward by launching its Contract Stocks Section, introducing 10 Chinese stock perpetual contracts with leverage of up to 20x. This expansion provides traders with a powerful new gateway to one of the world's fastest-growing equity markets while combining the flexibility of crypto-style derivatives with traditional stock exposure.
The newly listed contracts include leading Chinese technology and semiconductor-related companies such as YJTECH, LONGSYS, DSBJ, WUXIAPPTEC, HTGD, TFC, SHTECH, UNIS, BOE, and FENGHUA. These companies operate across advanced manufacturing, semiconductor components, precision electronics, artificial intelligence infrastructure, display technology, and high-end industrial innovation—industries expected to play a significant role in China's next phase of economic growth.
Unlike traditional stock investing, perpetual stock contracts allow traders to participate in price movements without directly owning the underlying shares. This creates greater flexibility for both bullish and bearish market strategies while offering access to leveraged positions that can enhance capital efficiency. For active traders, this opens entirely new possibilities for portfolio diversification and tactical trading.
The launch also reflects a broader transformation within the digital asset industry. Crypto exchanges are increasingly evolving into comprehensive financial platforms that combine cryptocurrencies, commodities, indices, and now equity-based derivative products within a single ecosystem. This convergence reduces barriers between traditional finance and blockchain-powered trading, giving users access to a wider range of investment opportunities without switching platforms.
One of the most attractive features of the new Contract Stocks Section is 1–20x adjustable leverage. This flexibility enables experienced traders to tailor their risk exposure according to their individual strategies and market conditions. Conservative participants may choose lower leverage for better capital preservation, while professional traders seeking higher market exposure can utilize greater leverage with disciplined risk management.
The timing of this launch is equally significant. Global demand for artificial intelligence, semiconductor manufacturing, cloud computing, and advanced electronics continues to accelerate. Many of the newly listed companies operate in industries directly benefiting from these long-term technological trends. As governments and enterprises invest heavily in digital infrastructure, investor interest in technology-driven businesses remains strong across international markets.
Liquidity will play a central role in determining the long-term success of these new contracts. Healthy trading volume typically improves execution quality, narrows bid-ask spreads, and strengthens confidence among market participants. As more traders participate, efficient price discovery can create a more dynamic and transparent trading environment that benefits both short-term speculators and long-term market observers.
However, leverage should always be approached responsibly. While leveraged products increase potential returns, they also magnify risk. Successful traders rarely rely on emotion or speculation alone. Instead, they combine technical analysis, macroeconomic research, disciplined position sizing, and clearly defined stop-loss strategies to protect capital during periods of market volatility.
Another important advantage of this expansion is global accessibility. Investors who previously faced geographical or regulatory barriers when accessing certain equity markets can now gain exposure through Gate's trading infrastructure. This helps create a more connected financial ecosystem where innovation and accessibility work together to broaden market participation.
As financial markets become increasingly interconnected, exchanges that continue introducing diversified products are likely to attract greater institutional and retail participation. The integration of equity contracts alongside digital assets represents another milestone in the evolution of modern online trading, offering users more tools to build balanced and opportunity-driven portfolios.
Looking ahead, the Contract Stocks Section may serve as the foundation for even broader expansion into international equities, sector-based products, and advanced financial instruments. As blockchain technology continues to transform global finance, platforms capable of delivering secure, efficient, and innovative trading experiences will be well positioned to lead the next generation of digital markets.
The introduction of these 10 Chinese stock contracts is more than a product launch—it reflects the ongoing convergence of traditional finance and digital innovation. By providing flexible access, leveraged trading, and exposure to globally important industries, Gate is helping shape a more accessible and diversified investment landscape for traders around the world.
Trading Highlights
📈 10 Chinese Stock Contracts Listed
⚡ 1–20x Adjustable Leverage
💹 10 USDT Trading Pairs
🌍 Exposure to China's Leading Technology & Semiconductor Companies
🚀 Designed for Professional and Retail Traders Seeking Greater Market Opportunities
What are your thoughts? Will stock perpetual contracts become the next major trend in digital trading, or do you believe traditional equity investing will remain the preferred choice for long-term investors? Share your insights and join the discussion.