Tech & AI Daily — Friday, July 17, 2026

SOXL crashes 10% as Micron's plunge and AI capex doubts spark a broad semiconductor rout that rippled into Asian markets overnight. • Google's Gemini 3.5 Pro is reportedly months behind schedule, with engineer frustration and coding setbacks vs. OpenAI and Anthropic raising red flags ahead of Alphabet earnings. • China's Moonshot AI releases Kimi K3, an open-weight model benchmarking close to GPT-5.6 Sol and Claude Fable 5, signaling the capability gap with US frontier labs is narrowing fast. • AI infrastructure finance pivots: the same lenders who bankrolled GPU training buildouts are now placing a $400M bet on inference chips, marking a structural shift in how the industry deploys AI compute. • LM Studio launches Bionic, a full agentic layer for open models running on local hardware, giving privacy-focused developers a serious off-cloud alternative to cloud-based AI agents.