Baidu
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Baidu, Inc. (NASDAQ: BIDU; HKEX: 9888) is a Chinese technology company headquartered in Beijing that operates China's leading search engine and has spent the past decade rebuilding itself around artificial intelligence. Founded in January 2000 by Robin Li and Eric Xu, Baidu dominated Chinese-language web search for two decades before staking its future on four AI pillars: the ERNIE family of foundation models, the Apollo Go robotaxi service, the Kunlun AI accelerator line designed by its subsidiary Kunlunxin, and the Baidu AI Cloud business.[1] The transformation is now visible in its accounts: in the first quarter of 2026, AI-related businesses generated about 52 percent of Baidu Core revenue, crossing the halfway mark for the first time.[2]
| Item | Detail |
|---|---|
| Founded | January 18, 2000, Beijing (Haidian District) |
| Founders | Robin Li, Eric Xu |
| Headquarters | Beijing, China |
| Listings | Nasdaq (August 2005); Hong Kong secondary listing (March 2021) |
| Chairman and CEO | Robin Li |
| Chief technology officer | Wang Haifeng (since May 2019) |
| Chief financial officer | Haijian He (since July 2025) |
| Revenue (2024) | RMB 133.1 billion |
| Employees | About 35,900 (2024) |
| Key AI assets | ERNIE models, Apollo Go, Kunlunxin chips, Baidu AI Cloud, PaddlePaddle |
Baidu reports results in two segments: Baidu Core, which spans search and the mobile ecosystem, AI Cloud, and intelligent driving, plus the majority-owned video streaming platform iQIYI.[1] Internally, the core is organized into the Mobile Ecosystem Group (MEG), the AI Cloud Group (ACG), and the Intelligent Driving Group (IDG); executive vice president Shen Dou has led ACG since May 2022.[3] Wang Haifeng, a natural language processing researcher who was the first Chinese president of the Association for Computational Linguistics, became chief technology officer in May 2019 and oversaw the ERNIE program.[4] Haijian He, formerly chief financial officer of Kingsoft Cloud, was appointed CFO in July 2025.[5]
Robin Li, a Chinese software engineer who had built the link-analysis search system RankDex in 1996 while working for a Dow Jones subsidiary in New Jersey, founded Baidu in Beijing in January 2000 with Eric Xu, a biochemist, backed by 1.2 million dollars from the venture firms Integrity Partners and Peninsula Capital.[6] The company first sold search technology to Chinese portals, then pivoted to running its own consumer search engine monetized through paid listings. It turned profitable in 2004, the year Xu left the company, and listed on Nasdaq on August 5, 2005, with shares closing up more than 350 percent on the first day.[7] Baidu became the first Chinese company added to the NASDAQ-100 in December 2007, held roughly 76 percent of China's search market as of 2015, and was the world's second-largest search engine as of December 2020. A secondary listing in Hong Kong in March 2021 raised 3.1 billion dollars.[1]
Baidu moved into AI earlier than most large internet companies. It set up the Institute of Deep Learning in 2013, recruited Andrew Ng as chief scientist from 2014 to 2017, open-sourced its PaddlePaddle deep learning framework in 2016, announced the Apollo open autonomous driving platform in 2017, unveiled its first Kunlun chip in 2018, and began publishing the ERNIE series of pretrained language models in 2019.[1][8] The release of OpenAI's ChatGPT in late 2022 turned that research portfolio into the company's central commercial story: Baidu was the first major Chinese technology company to answer with its own chatbot, ERNIE Bot, in March 2023.[9]
ERNIE (Enhanced Representation through kNowledge IntEgration) began in 2019 as a family of knowledge-enhanced pretrained models. ERNIE Bot, known in Chinese as Wenxin Yiyan, opened for invited testing on March 16, 2023, and became generally available on August 31, 2023, after Baidu received approval under China's generative AI regulations; the company reported more than 200 million users by April 2024.[9][10]
On March 16, 2025, Baidu released the natively multimodal ERNIE 4.5 and the reasoning model ERNIE X1, which the company said matched DeepSeek R1's performance at half the price, and it made ERNIE Bot free to all users ahead of schedule from April 1, 2025.[11][12] In February 2025 Baidu had announced it would open-source the new generation, reversing Robin Li's earlier preference for closed models.[13] It followed through on June 30, 2025, releasing the ERNIE 4.5 family, ten model variants ranging from a 0.3B-parameter dense model to a mixture-of-experts model with 424 billion total and 47 billion active parameters, under the Apache 2.0 license on Hugging Face, GitHub, and PaddlePaddle.[14][15]
At the Baidu World conference on November 13, 2025, Baidu introduced ERNIE 5.0, a natively multimodal large language model reported at about 2.4 trillion parameters that handles text, images, audio, and video, available in preview through ERNIE Bot and the Qianfan cloud platform.[16][17]
| Release | Date | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| ERNIE 1.0 | 2019 | Knowledge-enhanced pretraining research model |
| ERNIE Bot | March 16, 2023 (invited); public August 31, 2023 | China's first major ChatGPT rival |
| ERNIE 4.0 | October 2023 | Flagship closed model |
| ERNIE 4.5 and X1 | March 16, 2025 | Native multimodal model plus reasoning model; chatbot made free |
| ERNIE 4.5 open-source family | June 30, 2025 | Ten models, Apache 2.0, largest 424B total parameters |
| ERNIE 5.0 | November 13, 2025 | Native multimodal, about 2.4T parameters (reported) |
Baidu began autonomous driving research in 2013 and announced Apollo, an open autonomous driving platform, in 2017. Its robotaxi service Apollo Go opened to the public in 2020, with early operations in cities including Changsha and Beijing, and in August 2022 Baidu received China's first permits for fully driverless paid robotaxi rides in Wuhan and Chongqing.[18] The purpose-built sixth-generation vehicle, the Apollo RT6, was unveiled in July 2022 with full system redundancy and a target cost of about 250,000 yuan; Baidu has since put the unit cost below 30,000 dollars. Wuhan became the flagship deployment, with a target of 1,000 RT6 vehicles by the end of 2024 and a service area of roughly 3,000 square kilometers, and Baidu told investors on its Q2 2025 earnings call that the Wuhan operation had reached unit-economics breakeven.[18][19]
Scale accelerated through 2025. Apollo Go delivered 3.4 million fully driverless rides in the fourth quarter of 2025, more than 200 percent growth year over year, with weekly orders peaking above 300,000. By February 2026 the service had surpassed 20 million cumulative rides across 26 cities worldwide, with over 300 million autonomous kilometers driven, 190 million of them fully driverless; Baidu says its vehicles average one airbag deployment per 12 million kilometers.[20]
International expansion began with Hong Kong, where Apollo Go received its first pilot license in November 2024, its first right-hand-drive market.[18][20] In 2025 and 2026 the company signed platform partnerships with Uber and Lyft: service on Uber's platform in Dubai launched in April 2026, a partnership with AutoGo is building a fully driverless fleet in Abu Dhabi, London pilots with Uber and Lyft were planned for the first half of 2026, and testing began with PostBus in the Swiss canton of St. Gallen. In February 2026 Apollo Go announced entry into South Korea, starting in the Seoul metropolitan area, its first Asian market beyond mainland China and Hong Kong.[18][20] The program has not been free of setbacks: in early April 2026, a system malfunction reportedly left more than 100 Apollo Go vehicles immobilized in Wuhan traffic, prompting scrutiny of fleet reliability.[21] Apollo Go competes with Waymo globally and with Pony.ai and WeRide in China and the Middle East.
Baidu started building FPGA-based AI accelerators in 2011 and had deployed more than 12,000 FPGAs internally by 2017. It announced its first dedicated AI chip, Kunlun, in July 2018 on Samsung's 14 nm process, shipped it in 2020, and released the 7 nm Kunlun II, positioned against the NVIDIA A100, in August 2021; the chip unit was spun out in April 2021 as Kunlunxin.[8] In April 2025 Baidu lit up a cluster of 30,000 third-generation P800 chips, pitched as capable of training DeepSeek-class models with hundreds of billions of parameters, and P800s now handle the bulk of Baidu's own inference workloads.[8][22][23]
At Baidu World on November 13, 2025, the company laid out a five-year silicon roadmap: the M100, optimized for large-scale mixture-of-experts inference, arriving in early 2026; the M300, aimed at training and inference for ultra-large multimodal models, in early 2027; Tianchi 256 and Tianchi 512 supernode clusters during 2026; new products every year for five years; and a goal of a one-million-card Kunlun cluster by 2030.[24][25] Analysts framed the push as filling the gap left by US export controls on NVIDIA hardware, alongside Huawei's Ascend line.[23]
| Chip | Timing | Focus |
|---|---|---|
| Kunlun (gen 1) | Announced July 2018, shipped 2020 | First dedicated AI chip, Samsung 14 nm |
| Kunlun II | August 2021 | 7 nm training and inference |
| P800 (gen 3) | Deployed at scale by April 2025 | 30,000-chip training cluster; powers Baidu inference |
| M100 | Early 2026 | Large-scale MoE inference |
| M300 | Early 2027 | Ultra-large multimodal training and inference |
In January 2026 Kunlunxin filed confidentially for a carve-out IPO on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, and in May 2026 it began the listing guidance process for a dual listing on Shanghai's STAR Market; analysts cited valuations that could approach HK$100 billion.[22][26]
Baidu AI Cloud sells infrastructure, the Qianfan model-as-a-service platform, and AI applications, and it has become the company's growth engine. AI Cloud revenue grew 42 percent year over year in the first quarter of 2025.[27] In the first quarter of 2026, total AI Cloud revenue reached RMB 11.3 billion, with the infrastructure portion up 79 percent year over year to RMB 8.8 billion and GPU cloud revenue up 184 percent.[2][28] Combined AI businesses generated RMB 13.6 billion, about 52 percent of Baidu Core revenue of RMB 26.0 billion, which returned to 1 percent year-over-year growth after several quarters of decline; total quarterly revenue was RMB 32.1 billion.[2] Analysts attribute the cloud unit's outperformance to full-stack integration, from Kunlun chips through PaddlePaddle and ERNIE to applications, though heavy infrastructure spending has kept margins under pressure.[2][28]
Baidu is the bellwether of China's AI industry. It was the first Chinese internet giant to commit to deep learning in the early 2010s, the first to field a ChatGPT-class chatbot, and it remains one of the few companies anywhere operating a full AI stack: self-designed accelerators, a homegrown deep learning framework, frontier-scale foundation models, a hyperscale cloud, and consumer applications including search and robotaxis.[2][9] Its 2025 swing to open-source models, after DeepSeek reset price expectations, helped push Chinese frontier AI toward permissive licensing, while its Kunlun roadmap and the planned Kunlunxin listings sit at the center of China's drive for semiconductor self-sufficiency under US export controls.[14][23] The transition carries risk: the legacy advertising business that funded two decades of research is shrinking, robotaxi expansion invites regulatory and reliability scrutiny, and competition is intense from Alibaba's Qwen, ByteDance's Doubao, DeepSeek, and Huawei. Even so, with AI now supplying more than half of core revenue and Apollo Go among the largest robotaxi operations in the world, Baidu's reinvention is further along than that of most search-era incumbents.[2][20]