AI video generation is costly to serve, so a chip built for it could lower costs for Kuaishou and other video platforms once volume shipments start in 2027.
Lingchuan Technology, a chip designer spun out of Kuaishou’s computing hardware division, has raised RMB1 billion in a Series B round to develop and mass-produce its next generation of AI video chips. The round was co-led by E-Town Capital’s Yitang Shenghe Fund (亦庄国投屹唐盛和基金), Qiming Venture Partners and Zhaohui Capital, PEdaily reported on November 4. The money will also fund expansion into overseas markets.
The company was set up jointly by the Beijing Municipal AI Fund and Kuaishou, and grew out of Kuaishou’s heterogeneous computing and chip division, which was spun off to operate independently in March 2024, according to Leidi. Its founder, chairman and chief executive is Liu Lingzhi, a former Kuaishou vice president who began building the platform’s chip team in 2018 after technical management roles at Huawei and Intel. Liu holds a doctorate from Shanghai Jiao Tong University and was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Washington, PEdaily reported. The core team comes from Kuaishou, Huawei, Alibaba, Baidu, Nvidia, AMD, Intel and Arm, averages more than 15 years of experience, and has led more than 10 tape-outs and mass-production launches of AI and video chips, according to the outlet.
The valuation was not disclosed, and none of the reports said how large a stake Kuaishou still holds.
The SL200 has moved beyond Kuaishou
Lingchuan’s SL200 chip has shipped nearly 100,000 units and handles 99.7% of Kuaishou’s live-streaming transcoding. Its customers include Kuaishou, Alibaba Cloud, Baidu Cloud and Bilibili, Leidi reported, and since the start of 2026 the chip has also been deployed through telecom operators and other partners in data centers, smart security systems, and entertainment and transport uses. 36Kr reported the same shipment and customer figures.
The SL series handles video transcoding, the conversion of video into the formats and quality levels needed for different screens and network speeds, a constant workload for any live-streaming platform. The round follows a Series A+ of several hundred million yuan in June, led by Qifu Capital.
One existing investor told PEdaily that Lingchuan remains closely tied to Kuaishou and its Kling video generation business commercially. EastFrontier has followed Kling’s growth as a standalone business, including its reported Hong Kong IPO push.
A 3D-stacked chip targets AI video generation
The round is mainly a bet on Lingchuan’s next product. Its new chip, built with fully domestic 3D stacking technology, completed tape-out, the final design handoff to the factory, in April 2026 and has recently returned from the foundry, with volume shipments expected in 2027, Leidi reported.
The chip is aimed at AI video production, where it is meant to cut the cost and time of generating video. It will work alongside the SL series across video production, recommendation, review and distribution, PEdaily reported. Lingchuan describes its design as combining a latency-deterministic architecture it calls DiPU with a 3D near-memory structure that uses hybrid bonding and advanced packaging, placing memory directly on top of the logic to speed up data access. The company also says it works within the RISC-V open chip architecture ecosystem.
On software, the company’s LUCAS computing platform has been adapted to models including Alibaba’s Qwen and Wanxiang, Tencent’s Hunyuan Video and MiniMax, and its Nebula platform offers text-to-video and image-to-video generation for content creation and tourism, according to PEdaily.
Shipments of the new chip in 2027 are the milestone
The investor list suggests broad support. Beyond the three leads, the round drew investors including Guotai Haitong Kaiyuan, China Life’s Yangtze River Delta sci-tech fund and HKSTP Ventures, the venture fund of Hong Kong Science and Technology Parks, with strategic investment from Stony Creek Capital, Loongson’s venture arm and Anhui’s culture and tourism investment group, while existing shareholders Shunxi Fund, Shuimu Investment Group and Jiuzhi Capital added money, PEdaily reported.
The test is whether the 3D-stacked chip reaches volume production on schedule next year and wins customers beyond Kuaishou, as the SL200 did with Alibaba Cloud, Baidu and Bilibili. A deployment announcement from a video generation service other than Kling would be the clearest sign that the chip can compete for AI video workloads that now run largely on GPUs.