AI Daily: Saturday, July 18, 2026

My Daily AI & Markets Briefing · Jul 18, 2026 · 8m

SOXL cratered ~25% this week as AI hyperscaler spend skepticism, Chinese model competition from Kimi K3, and global semiconductor weakness hammered leveraged semis — QQQ and VGT each fell ~3–3.5%, VUG dropped ~2.4%. • Moonshot AI's open-source Kimi K3 matches or beats Anthropic's Opus 4.8, marking the clearest sign yet that Chinese frontier labs have closed the capability gap with leading US labs. • Meta is in talks to lease its AI infrastructure to Anthropic, potentially entering the cloud compute market and challenging AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud directly. • Databricks hit a $188 billion…