By Jim Shimabukuro (assisted by Gemini)
Editor
[Also see Tell Me More About Anthropic (Sep. 2025), Among AI Peers, DeepMind Is the Most Scientifically Driven]
Gemini: As of mid-October 2025, the field of AI in China is highly competitive. Baidu is a major leader, particularly in core AI technology and autonomous driving: (1) Large Language Models (LLMs) and Generative AI: Baidu’s ERNIE Bot is one of the most prominent LLMs and holds a strong position. One report from 2024 indicated that Baidu AI Cloud held China’s largest LLM market share with 19.9%. (2) Autonomous Driving: Baidu’s Apollo Go robotaxi fleet is a key player, often cited as one of the world’s largest autonomous driving experiments. The Chinese government also designated Baidu as a national champion for Autonomous Vehicles.
However, significant competition comes from other established giants and rapidly emerging startups: (1) Alibaba and Tencent are massive investors in AI, leveraging their vast ecosystems and cloud platforms. Alibaba is a leader in the overall AI cloud services market in China (one report from H1 2025 gave Alibaba Cloud 35.8% market share, with Baidu Cloud at 6.1%). (2) Huawei and SenseTime are also designated “national AI teams” and are strong in areas like AI hardware, computer vision, and intelligent vision. (3) The “AI Tigers” Startups: Companies like Zhipu AI, Moonshot AI (with its popular Kimi chatbot), MiniMax, and DeepSeek have rapidly emerged and are leading in areas like generative AI and open-source models, challenging the established players. For example, DeepSeek is recognized globally for its cost-efficient, high-performance open-source models.
Here are twenty important facts about Baidu:
- Baidu’s core business remains its dominant position in China’s search engine market, where it commanded a market share above 56% as of late 2024, maintaining its reputation as the “Google of China” despite fierce competition from content and social media platforms like WeChat and Douyin (Investopedia, Statcounter).
- The company is fundamentally engaged in a major strategic pivot, shifting its primary focus from its traditional, slowing online advertising business towards high-growth, technology-driven segments, namely Artificial Intelligence and Cloud Services, to secure its future growth and diversify revenue streams (Investing.com).
- Baidu’s large language model, ERNIE Bot (or Wenxin Yiyan), is a central pillar of its AI strategy, rapidly growing its user base to over 200 million users as of early 2024, demonstrating its strong traction and competitive standing in China’s generative AI race (Al Jazeera).
- Baidu is actively integrating its ERNIE foundation models, most recently the ERNIE 4.5 version, directly into its core search platform, aiming to transform the user experience by delivering AI-generated responses for a majority of mobile search results to defend its ecosystem and user base (Zacks, Complete AI Training).
- The company’s non-online marketing revenue stream is growing robustly, surging 34% year-over-year in the second quarter of 2025, a growth largely fueled by the accelerating expansion of its AI Cloud business, signaling successful diversification away from its core advertising reliance (Zacks).
- Baidu AI Cloud has established itself as a leader, holding the top rank as China’s leading AI cloud provider for six consecutive years by the second quarter of 2025, underpinned by its full-stack AI architecture that integrates infrastructure, frameworks, models, and applications (Zacks).
- The cornerstone of Baidu’s intelligent mobility strategy is Apollo Go, its autonomous ride-hailing service, which has surpassed a massive milestone of over 14 million cumulative rides provided to the public as of August 2025, reinforcing its status as China’s largest robotaxi operator (Gasgoo, Zelos Tech).
- Apollo Go demonstrated significant operational growth, having delivered over 2.2 million fully driverless rides in the second quarter of 2025 alone, marking a substantial 148% year-over-year increase and showcasing accelerating real-world deployment (Gasgoo, Zelos Tech).
- In a major move toward international expansion, Baidu’s Apollo Go entered into a multi-year strategic partnership with Uber in July 2025 to deploy thousands of its autonomous vehicles on the Uber platform across various international markets outside the US and Mainland China, starting with Asia and the Middle East (Inside China Auto, Gasgoo).
- Baidu’s autonomous driving division is also focusing on European markets, having partnered with Lyft in August 2025 with plans to deploy Apollo Go robotaxis in key markets like Germany and the UK as soon as 2026 (Gasgoo).
- The Apollo Go platform has specifically expanded into complex, right-hand drive environments, commencing open-road testing in Hong Kong as of August 2025 and conducting trials in Dubai and Abu Dhabi, which is critical for demonstrating its global scalability across different traffic laws (Gasgoo, Zelos Tech).
- Baidu is deeply committed to technological self-sufficiency in hardware, actively developing and deploying its own proprietary Kunlun AI chips within its cloud and AI infrastructure, a move that reduces reliance on overseas suppliers like Nvidia and potentially boosts future margins (Investing.com, Complete AI Training).
- The company holds one of the largest portfolios of AI-related patents and patent applications in China, spanning various areas including foundation models and AI agents, underscoring its significant investment and output in long-term research and development (Baidu Announces First Quarter 2025 Results press release snippet via Google Search).
- Baidu’s overall revenue has recently come under pressure, with total revenues in the second quarter of 2025 seeing a 4% year-over-year decrease and its core online marketing revenue declining by 15%, which analysts attribute to intensifying competition and a sluggish macroeconomic environment (AlphaSense).
- Despite the near-term revenue pressure and heavy AI investment, Baidu maintains a strong financial cushion, reporting a net cash position of RMB 155.1 billion (approximately $21.4 billion) as of June 30, 2025, providing ample liquidity for sustained innovation (Zacks).
- Baidu’s stock, traded under the ticker BIDU on the NASDAQ, has shown significant volatility and an impressive 42.3% year-to-date rally as of mid-October 2025, which reflects renewed investor confidence in its AI and autonomous driving growth stories (Zacks).
- The company’s valuation, as measured by its Price-to-Earnings (P/E) ratio of around 10.94x in October 2025, remains noticeably lower than the industry average, suggesting the market may be undervaluing its long-term cash generation potential from its AI pivot (Simply Wall St).
- Beyond its core search and AI businesses, Baidu maintains a wide variety of internet services and apps, including its flagship Baidu App (with over 700 million MAUs), Baidu Maps, and a controlling stake in the video streaming service iQIYI, forming a broad digital ecosystem (Wikipedia, Search Endurance).
- Baidu’s commitment to the broader AI developer community is evident through its Qianfan Cloud platform, which is an end-to-end suite for enterprise model training and deployment, featuring an expanding model library that includes open-sourced ERNIE models and third-party systems (Zacks).
- The company was officially designated as one of China’s national “AI champions” by the government in 2018, specifically tasked to lead development in the area of Autonomous Vehicles, highlighting its critical role in the country’s national technology strategy (Wikipedia).
[End]
Filed under: Uncategorized |
Educational Technology and Change Journal 
Leave a comment