Jensen Huang just did something most American tech CEOs wouldn’t dream of: he walked into a Chinese trade expo and told the world that China’s AI models are “world class.” And he did it while his own company’s stock was getting hammered by one of those very models.
The Nvidia chief, speaking at the China International Supply Chain Expo, argued that American companies should “absolutely” be allowed to use Chinese open-source AI models. That puts him squarely at odds with Trump administration officials and US AI labs that have been lobbying Washington to shut Chinese models out entirely.
The Kimi K3 shock and its market fallout
Here’s what triggered all the hand-wringing. Moonshot AI, a Chinese startup, released Kimi K3 around mid-July 2026. The model packs 2.8 trillion parameters and a 1 million-token context window. It topped benchmarks in frontend coding tasks on the Frontend Code Arena leaderboard and scored highly on GDPval-AA v2 tests.
Wall Street’s reaction was swift and painful. Semiconductor stocks dropped more than 20% from their June 2026 peaks after the release. Nvidia briefly lost its crown as the world’s most valuable company.
