Kling raises $2.8 billion with Alibaba, Tencent and Baidu backing

Published: 2026-07-05T11:57:26.000Z

Kling has just pulled off the biggest fundraising the AI video business has ever seen, and the guest list is what makes it remarkable. The unit, spun out of Chinese group Kuaishou, raised roughly 2.8 billion dollars, with Alibaba, Tencent and Baidu all writing cheques together.

Kling has just pulled off the biggest fundraising the artificial intelligence video business has ever seen, and the guest list is what makes it remarkable. The video-generation unit, spun out of the Chinese short-video group Kuaishou, disclosed in a Hong Kong exchange filing on 2 July that it had raised roughly 2.8 billion dollars, with the round capped at around three billion. What turns heads is that Alibaba, Tencent and Baidu, three fierce rivals who rarely sit at the same table, all wrote cheques together, alongside dozens of state-linked funds and private equity names. The deal values the business at about 15 billion dollars before the new money and closer to 18 billion after it. The logic behind that unusual truce is commercial rather than sentimental. Each of the big three already runs its own video model, yet all three decided a minority stake in Kling was worth more than keeping a competitor starved of cash. Kling serves tens of millions of creators and thousands of enterprise clients around the world, a user base that throws off training data and market intelligence no internal lab can easily replicate. For Alibaba's cloud arm there is the added prize of a hungry compute customer, and for everyone involved there is the prospect of an initial public offering, with Kuaishou reportedly planning a Hong Kong listing within a year and its own stake set to fall from full ownership to around 68 per cent. The numbers help explain the enthusiasm. Kling generated more than 650 million yuan, roughly 96 million dollars, in the first quarter of this year, a jump of more than 300 per cent, and its annualized revenue run rate reached about 500 million dollars by March after the release of its 3.0 model. The timing is fortunate too, since OpenAI has pulled back its consumer Sora app and Runway has drifted away from consumer video, leaving space for a well-funded alternative just as demand climbs, even if the punishing cost of the compute these systems devour remains the obvious risk. The Gulf has quietly bought a seat at this table. Among the co-leaders of the round sits BlueFive Capital of Abu Dhabi, a sign of how readily sovereign and institutional money from the region is now flowing towards Chinese AI platforms with real overseas revenue. It fits a wider pattern in which funds tied to the UAE and Saudi Arabia are spreading bets across the global AI landscape even as they pour billions into homegrown champions such as HUMAIN and G42. For a region investing heavily in film, media and a booming creator economy under plans like Saudi Arabia's Vision 2030, a stake in the world's fastest-growing video engine is both a financial play and a strategic hedge.