A short-video app best known for farmers, livestreamers and instant noodles is now running a heavily used AI video studio.
Inside Kuaishou, a team that started as a research side-project now reports straight to the chief executive.
The question hanging over it is no longer whether the technology works, but whether it should stay inside the mothership at all.
Key takeaways
- Kling (可灵AI), Kuaishou's text-to-video model, generated an estimated RMB 10.4亿 (≈ US$143M) across 2025, with the fourth quarter alone at RMB 3.4亿 (≈ US$47M), according to the company's results.
- Its annualized revenue run rate crossed US$300M in January 2026, up from US$240M in December 2025.
- Kuaishou set up Kling as a first-tier business unit in April 2025, led by senior vice president Gai Kun (盖坤) and reporting directly to CEO Cheng Yixiao (程一笑).
- In May 2026 the company said in a Hong Kong exchange filing it was reviewing a possible restructuring that could bring in outside funding — but called the plan preliminary, with no binding agreement.
From a research demo to a profit line
Kling launched in June 2024 as a video generation large model (大模型) built by Kuaishou's own AI team. It renders clips at 1080p for up to two minutes and was, at launch, among the first publicly available models to produce photorealistic footage at that length.
What changed in 2025 was not just the model quality but the money. Kuaishou's full-year results, released on 25 March 2026, put group revenue at RMB 1,428亿 (≈ US$19.7B), up 12.5% year on year, with adjusted net profit of RMB 206亿 (≈ US$2.84B), up 16.5%. Buried inside that was a line item that mattered to AI watchers: Kling's fourth-quarter revenue reached RMB 3.4亿 (≈ US$47M).
Across the four quarters the unit's revenue climbed from roughly RMB 1.5亿 to RMB 3.4亿, summing to about RMB 10.4亿 (≈ US$143M) for the year — well above an internal target of US$60M set at the start of 2025. By December, monthly revenue topped US$20M, implying an annualized run rate (ARR) of US$240M; by January 2026 that run rate had passed US$300M.
The model upgrades that drove usage
The commercial push rode on a rapid release cadence in the second half of 2025:
- Kling O1 (可灵O1), billed as a unified multimodal video model that merges text, image, video and subject inputs into one editing engine.
- Kling 2.6 (可灵2.6), which added "audio-visual sync" (音画同出) — generating natural voiceover, sound effects and ambient audio in a single pass rather than dubbing after the fact — plus motion-control features.
- Kling 3.0 (可灵3.0), rolled out in February 2026 on an "All-in-One" design supporting full multimodal input and output, with automatic storyboarding and shot control.
Kuaishou has said that by the end of 2025 Kling had more than 60 million global users, had produced over 600 million videos, and served more than 30,000 enterprise customers and developers through its API. These figures come from the company's results disclosures relayed by Chinese financial media; they were not itemized in the IR PDF snippet we reviewed directly.
An organizational bet
In April 2025 Kuaishou promoted Kling to a first-tier business department, placed alongside e-commerce and monetization as a core operation. It is led by senior vice president Gai Kun (盖坤) and reports directly to CEO Cheng Yixiao (程一笑). In April 2026 Kuaishou also incorporated two Kling-related entities — Beijing Kling Technology Co. and Beijing Kling Lingdong Technology Co. — both wholly owned.
That structure looks like the scaffolding for a spinoff. In May 2026, after market reports valued a possible fundraising at as much as US$20B, Kuaishou issued a voluntary announcement on the Hong Kong exchange. The company said its board was evaluating a restructuring of Kling's assets and business that might involve external financing, but stressed the plan was at a preliminary stage, that no final agreement had been signed, and that there was no guarantee it would proceed. Kuaishou's own market capitalization at the time was around HK$230 billion (≈ US$29.5B).
According to Li An, chief scientist at BrainNet (脑机网), separating a fast-growing AI unit from a consumer parent can unlock a cleaner valuation, but the harder test is whether the spinoff can keep paying for the GPUs once it loses the parent's balance sheet. Li An's comments reflect his own views and do not represent NeuroAI's editorial position or an endorsement by BrainNet (脑机网).
What the numbers say about strategy
Kuaishou is also spending to defend the lead. On the same March earnings call, management indicated 2026 capital expenditure of about RMB 260亿 (≈ US$3.59B), much of it directed at AI compute. For a company whose core business is advertising and e-commerce, that is a large bet on infrastructure.
The honest read: Kling is no longer a science project. It is a real revenue line growing faster than the parent, run as its own division, and now the subject of a public restructuring review. Whether it stays inside Kuaishou or lists on its own, the trajectory is the same story Chinese AI is telling in 2026 — the model layer is consolidating into a few players who can afford the compute, and the winners are the ones who already own a distribution channel.
Honest limitations
This article relies on Kuaishou's official 2025 results (filed to the Hong Kong exchange on 25 March 2026) and on Chinese financial-media reporting of the earnings call. We did not independently audit Kling's user and video-count figures, which appeared in media relays of the company's disclosures rather than in the IR PDF we reviewed directly. The US$20B valuation is a market report, not a company figure, and Kuaishou has explicitly said any restructuring is preliminary with no binding agreement. Currency conversions use an approximate RMB/USD rate of 7.1–7.25 and are rounded. We have not assessed Kling's technical quality against competitors such as ByteDance's Seedance or OpenAI's Sora, nor its overseas regulatory exposure.
What readers can do now
- Track Kuaishou's (01024.HK) subsequent filings and any further HKEX announcements on the Kling restructuring before treating a spinoff as decided.
- Watch the quarterly Kling revenue line in future results as the cleanest public signal of China's consumer-AI monetization pace.
- Compare Kling's ARR trajectory with other China video-model players such as Shengshu (生数科技) and Aishi (爱诗科技) when judging whether the segment is widening or concentrating.