The plan
Kling AI, Kuaishou's video-generation spinoff, is reportedly lining up underwriters for a Hong Kong listing. The target, per reporting this week: a $1 billion raise, an early-2027 debut, and a valuation of roughly $18 billion. The banks named are CICC, Goldman Sachs, and UBS. The unit was consolidated into a Beijing entity, Beijing Keling, in May, with a repurchase right attached if it fails to list by October 2031. That deadline suggests the parent is serious about getting this done.
The price tag, taken apart
Kling's $500 million in annualized revenue, growing at over 200 percent year on year, is genuinely impressive for a product that launched in 2024. An $18 billion valuation is still roughly 36 times that figure, and puts a two-year-old spinoff at two-thirds the value of Kuaishou itself.
Some of that is defensible. Across a ten-month window ending in August, Kuaishou's models generated about 64 percent of all successful AI video renders on one major platform, which makes this the market leader in usage rather than a lab project. But an IPO for a company whose core input is GPU compute has a familiar logic: public markets are where you finance the burn you cannot finance privately. The July private round got Kling to $18 billion. The IPO asks investors to fund what comes next.
The company it keeps
Kling would not be listing into a vacuum. Zhipu and MiniMax both went public on the Hong Kong exchange in January this year, and both have since fallen 70 to 80 percent from their highs, per market data circulating this week. Moonshot AI, the company behind Kimi, is reportedly planning its own Hong Kong listing for early 2027 at a $50 billion valuation. Four major Chinese AI firms floating within roughly a year of each other is a lot of paper chasing the same appetite.
None of this means Kling will follow the same path. But Hong Kong retail has now watched two AI debuts bleed out, and that memory sets the terms for the third and fourth.
What to watch
Whether the banks are confirmed and whether filings arrive in early 2027 are the near-term tests. The deeper question is simpler: how much of that $500 million in revenue converts into durable margin once the compute bill is fully counted. Until then, the $18 billion is a price on a story, and the story is that AI video keeps growing forever. It might. That does not make it cheap.
Sources
- [1] Zubiqo — “Kuaishou AI video spinoff Kling reportedly eyes $1B Hong Kong IPO at $18B valuation” (Oct 6, 2026)Read source
- [2] KR-Asia — “Kuaishou's Kling AI seeks fresh funding ahead of planned 2027 IPO” (June 2026)Read source
- [3] PitchBook — China AI IPO wave (Sep 2026)Read source
- [4] Magnific — AI video model usage dataRead source