This month a Beijing lab built the largest artificial mind ever made, two point eight trillion parameters, then published it for anyone to download.
Chip stocks fell ten percent in a week, their worst since the tariff crash, and semiconductors dropped twenty percent from June's record.
Wall Street had rehearsed this. Eighteen months earlier another Chinese model erased five hundred and ninety-three billion dollars from one chipmaker in a single day.
The answer was to spend more. This year the five biggest cloud companies will lay out seven hundred and twenty-five billion dollars on machines.
The second answer was a wall. Since twenty twenty-two America has barred its best chips from China, tightening the list almost every year.
It arrived anyway, on one blind coding benchmark finishing first, ahead of every closed Western system, though overall it still ranks third.
Its designers bet on memory rather than raw power, stretching the model's attention across a million words at once, architecture standing in for silicon.
Or so it seemed. A White House official says the lab reached America's banned chips anyway, by renting them through servers in Thailand.
The same official accuses it of copying an American model's answers. Washington has opened an investigation; the company has not been charged.
The chipmaker at the centre of the panic disagrees with it — cheaper models, its founder argues, mean more people using chips, not fewer.
The money seems to agree. Within days the lab's demand crashed its own servers, and its valuation talks jumped from thirty-one billion to fifty.
So the wall keeps rising and the thing it was built to stop keeps arriving free. Nobody is asking whether it works, only how high.