Kling AI from China Raised $2 Billion for AI Video Generation Development

Chinese video-AI developer Kling AI, spun out from Kuaishou Technology, has attracted its first funding round of $2 billion — Bloomberg reported. The round became one of the largest investments in generative video based on artificial intelligence and is expected to accelerate the company's operational expansion.

What is Kling AI

Kling is a video generation model from text descriptions and images, which Kuaishou introduced in 2024. The model quickly gained a reputation as one of the strongest in the world in terms of image quality and physically realistic object motion and became a showcase of Kuaishou's AI ambitions far beyond its original short-video business.

The parent company is one of China's largest short-video operators, a direct competitor to ByteDance-owned Douyin (the Chinese equivalent of TikTok). Kuaishou's shares trade on the Hong Kong Exchange. The launch and scaling of Kling became a strategic bet for the company on generative AI as a new source of growth beyond the traditional ad model.

Why the company needed new capital

Training and operating modern video models require colossal computational power — the count runs into tens of thousands of GPUs and hundreds of millions of dollars in data center infrastructure costs. Spinning off Kling as a separate business with its own funding round allows Kuaishou to attract capital specifically for video-AI without diluting the parent company's balance sheet.

• The first tranche of the round is $2 billion, according to Bloomberg
• Kling was launched by Kuaishou Technology in 2024
• The funds will go toward expansion of the company's operations in the video-AI sphere
• The parent company Kuaishou competes with ByteDance (owner of Douyin/TikTok)

Who Kling competes with

The generative video market has become one of the hottest segments of the AI industry, and Kling is far from the only contender for leadership. Among its direct competitors are OpenAI's Sora model, Runway, Google DeepMind's Veo and Luma AI startup's Dream Machine, as well as other Chinese developments, including Alibaba products. Video generated by such models is already used in advertising, previsualiation for film, in social media content production and in game asset development — these are the scenarios that Kling primarily intends to monetize.

Kling's round stands out even against the backdrop of the broader boom in Chinese AI sector investments in recent years: other labs in the country have also attracted large rounds, competing both among themselves and with American giants like OpenAI and Anthropic for talent, chips, and clients.

What this means

The $2 billion round demonstrates that Chinese video-AI developers are seriously competing for capital and computational resources with American labs. The generative video market remains one of the most capital-intensive segments of the AI industry, and the scale of investments in Kling is yet another confirmation that the race for leadership in it is far from over.