Global Semiconductors: Kimi K3, Another Jevon‘s Paradox

Research evidence excerpt

Global Semiconductors: Kimi K3, Another Jevon‘s Paradox

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19 Jul 2026 17:52:30 ET │ 9 pages

Global Semiconductors

Kimi K3, Another Jevon's Paradox

CITI'S TAKE

Moonshot AI launched the world largest open-weight model with the

scale of 2.8T parameters (see Artificial Intelligence: Citi's Inference Ahead

- Open Reaches the Frontier). While the full weights will be disclosed on 27

July, Kimi K3 outpaces global frontier models by offering lower cost per Peter LeeAC

token through key architectural technologies, according to media reports. +82-2-3705-0720

We anticipate the Kimi K3 launch will drive memory demand for Server peter.sc.lee@citi.com

DDR5 and eSSD due KV cache demand growth and token growth from AI

Jayden Oh agents. We maintain our constructive view on the memory market.

+82-2-3705-0747

jayden.oh@citi.com

Moonshot AI unveils the world's largest open-weight model — Moonshot AI (BBC,

18-Jul-2026) released Kimi K3, a 2.8T parameter model which would be the largest

open-weight LLM to date. While Kimi K3 will be the world's first open-weight model

unveiled publicly, the full weights will be disclosed on 27 July. The model is aimed at

long-horizon agentic work. Commercially, Kimi K3 outpaces frontier proprietary

models by a wide margin, with cheaper cost of US$0.3 per million cache-hit input

tokens and US$15 output. Given efficiency and significant performance, Kimi K3

requires multi-node cluster with supernode configurations of >64 GPUs. See latest

comments from our global head of technology research, Heath Terry: Artificial

Intelligence: Citi's Inference Ahead - Open Reaches the Frontier.

Kimi K3’s key technology — To enable such a distinctive performance, Kimi K3

utilized (Link) three architectural levers: 1) Kimi Delta Attention (KDA), 2) Attention