Kuaishou's Kling AI reached a 300 million annualized revenue run rate in January 2026 and is raising 3 billion at an $18 billion valuation ahead of a Hong Kong listing — the first Chinese AI application to prove recurring global revenue at scale, even as OpenAI retired its rival Sora. The bottleneck has moved past model research: it is now the multilingual commercial and creative-market leaders who can grow AI video revenue across Tokyo, Seoul, London and Los Angeles. A recruitment specialist at SunTzu Recruit describes a shortage that has become structural.
Eighteen months ago, DeepSeek was a research project funded by a quant hedge fund. Today it is valued at $71 billion, operates the world's most-called AI model, and is trying to double its workforce — in a market where AI engineers with production experience are scarcer than H100 GPUs. For executive search firms like SunTzu Recruitment, the gap between DeepSeek's ambition and the available talent pool defines the next frontier of tech hiring in China.