Cantor's Weekly AI Infra Recap

Research evidence excerpt

Cantor's Weekly AI Infra Recap

July 19, 2026

compute in the APAC region continues to intensify, reinforcing SHAZ's unique position

in that market.

Moonshot (private). Moonshot, a China-based AI startup, released Kimi K3 on Friday,

with it being the world's largest open-weight AI model at 2.8trn parameters. While

the model still trails Anthropic's Claude Fable 5 and OpenAI's GPT 5.6 Sol, it does

outperform other models such as Claude Opus 4.8 and GPT 5.5. High level, it shows

that China is closing the gap when it comes to AI models. This comes despite consistent

hardware and compute capacity constraints given export restrictions on accelerators.

NBIS. NBIS announced a new model business this week, one whereby they will let

infrastructure partners deploy their full-stack AI cloud platform in their own data

centers. Under this model, partners will finance and own the infrastructure and

hardware and operate the data center. NBIS will then supply the systems architecture,

deploy and maintain the hardware design and software. NBIS will then take that

capacity and sell it to customers. In terms of monetizing this model, it will consider

revenue-share arrangements, license fees, and committed capacity arrangements.

The company further noted it has already entered into initial arrangements under this

model.

CRWV. News broke (link) that CRWV is exploring the use of financial derivatives as a

potential hedge against a future drop in memory and storage chip prices. CRWV has

locked in memory prices at relatively higher prices and is looking to hedge itself should

memory costs fall.

META (OW, covered by D. Mathivanan). News broke (link) about Anthropic looking

to lease AI computing power from META, in a deal worth up to $10bn over two

years.