Kimi K3 sees surge in demand, Menlo Partner says GPU remains AI's hard currency

ME News reports that on July 20 (UTC+8), according to monitoring by Beating, Deedy Das, partner at Menlo Ventures, has put forward a “compute bull case” fueled by the surge in popularity of Kimi K3. Within two days of its launch, K3 entered the top ten most-used models on OpenRouter, processing approximately 140 billion tokens per day. Demand quickly neared the upper capacity limit of Moonshot AI, leading to the suspension of new subscriptions. Das argues that, over the coming years, those who secure early access to GPUs, cloud infrastructure, and electricity may hold the most valuable assets. As long as the most advanced models continue to improve, users remain focused on top-tier performance, and inference costs do not plummet dramatically, compute will remain structurally undersupplied. This thesis rests on clear assumptions: if model capabilities plateau, basic tasks shift to cheaper models, or inference costs suddenly drop significantly, compute scarcity will ease. Additionally, model developers may generate high revenues but still face losses due to high costs in training, talent acquisition, and user acquisition. (Source: BlockBeats)