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Baidu (NASDAQ:BIDU) reported a return to revenue growth in its first quarter of 2026, with management emphasizing that artificial intelligence has become the company’s primary growth engine and now accounts for a majority of its general business revenue
Co-founder and Chief Executive Robin Li said Baidu General Business revenue reached CNY 26.0 billion in the quarter, up 2% year over year. Revenue from the company’s core AI-powered business rose 49% year over year to CNY 13.6 billion, accounting for 52% of Baidu General Business revenue for the first time. – Why Alibaba’s New 5nm Chip Could Be a Game Changer “This is an important milestone as AI-powered business has now become the majority of our revenue mix,” Li said. “Together, these results confirm that AI has clearly become the primary growth driver of Baidu, reinforcing our position as an AI-first company.” AI Cloud Infrastructure Drives Growth Li said AI Cloud Infrastructure revenue grew 79% year over year in the quarter, with GPU Cloud revenue accelerating to 184% year-over-year growth, following 143% growth in the prior quarter. He said demand is rising across both training and inference workloads, with inference growing particularly quickly. – MarketBeat Week in Review – 01/05 – 01/09 Baidu attributed the momentum to its full-stack AI capabilities, including proprietary infrastructure, foundation models and applications.
Li highlighted Kunlunxin, Baidu’s self-developed AI chips, saying the chips are seeing expanding demand from customers across industries and have been deployed in a single AI computing cluster of more than 30,000 accelerators. Dou Shen, executive vice president and president of Baidu AI Cloud Group, said in response to an analyst question that enterprise demand for AI infrastructure remains strong across sectors including aeronautics, autonomous driving, onboard AI, gaming and advanced manufacturing. He said Baidu is also winning…