AI short dramas consume 55% of China's tokens as video models cash in
A TMTPost article citing data disclosed by Chinese Online says AI short dramas and video generation account for 55% of China's token consumption, versus 24% for e-commerce and marketing and 15% for software development; it says one minute of 1080p video costs roughly 3–3.6 million tokens, and a 120-minute AI live-action short drama carries about 30,000–40,000 yuan in model-side compute cost, around half of total cost. The piece reports Kling AI's Q1 2026 revenue at more than 650 million yuan, up over 300% year on year, with an annualized run rate near US$500 million and API revenue rising to 60% of the mix from 30% a year earlier; MiniMax raised its valuation sharply but posted about 2.4 billion yuan in first-half losses, and SenseTime's main business remained loss-making at 386 million yuan excluding special gains. It also notes rising costs — about 17–19 yuan per episode in March versus 80–100 yuan in May, Alibaba Cloud and Baidu AI Cloud compute price increases of up to 34%, and an industry hit rate of just 0.47%. The revenue, valuation and market-size figures are as relayed by the article and were not independently verified.
If the figures hold, AI video generation rather than software development is the dominant buyer of Chinese AI compute, reshaping assumptions about where AI money is actually made.