Goldman Sachs: After Kimi K3 Release, Zhipu and MiniMax Plummet, Era of Compute Monopoly Faces End

According to TechFlow Research, Goldman Sachs' July 18 report pointed out that Moonshot AI released the Kimi K3 model, with 2.8 trillion parameters, surpassing Claude Fable 5 and GPT-5.6 Sol to top the Arena.ai coding leaderboard, with API pricing at $2.3 per million tokens setting a new high for Chinese models. Two days after the release, Zhipu AI fell 28%, MiniMax fell 16%, Nasdaq 100 index futures fell over 1.8%, and the Philadelphia Semiconductor Index cumulatively fell over 18% from highs. Goldman Sachs believes Kimi K3 marks a turning point: a Chinese lab unable to match the largest pre-training compute capacity in the West rapidly narrowed the gap with top US models through architectural innovation and reinforcement learning, proving that "scaling" is no longer the only winning path. Goldman Sachs warns that the "compute expansion era" may be ending, and the AI infrastructure investment logic built around "the more compute, the better" needs to be rewritten. Goldman Sachs maintains a Buy rating on MiniMax and Neutral on Zhipu AI. Future focus should be on the intensive launch of 2-5 trillion parameter models such as Zhipu GLM, Alibaba Qwen, and MiniMax M3 Pro.