Baidu

Overview

Baidu’s 2026 has been a study in reversals. In May, the Chinese search-and-AI giant reported that its Core AI-powered Business had crossed half of its general business revenue for the first time — RMB13.6 billion, up 49% year over year, with its Apollo Go robotaxis logging 3.2 million fully driverless rides in a single quarter (Baidu). Three months later it missed revenue estimates, its shares fell, and its CEO vowed to bring the ERNIE chatbot back to “the AI frontier” after months without a major upgrade (Reuters). By late September, a U.S. law firm had filed a securities class action alleging Baidu overstated the AI business’s ability to offset its declining online-marketing revenue (Robbins LLP). Almost every reference profile of Baidu still reads as if it were 2015 — “China’s Google, founded in 2000 by Robin Li” — while the company is living through the most consequential business-model transition in its history.

The quarter the AI business crossed over

Baidu’s first-quarter 2026 results, reported on May 18, contained the milestone the company’s management had been promising for years. Its Core AI-powered Business reached RMB13.6 billion, up 49% from a year earlier, accounting for 52% of Baidu General Business revenue — the first time AI had crossed the halfway mark (Baidu). The drivers were specific and quantified: AI Cloud Infrastructure grew 79% to RMB8.8 billion, GPU Cloud revenue jumped 184%, AI Applications held roughly flat at RMB2.5 billion, and AI-native marketing grew 36% to RMB2.3 billion. Total revenue for the quarter was RMB32.1 billion (Baidu).

The same release showed the old business receding. iQIYI, Baidu’s video-streaming service, reported RMB6.2 billion in revenue, down 8% quarter over quarter. The Baidu App still had 655 million monthly active users in March 2026, a sign of the legacy search franchise’s scale even as its monetization shifted. On the model front, ERNIE 5.1 launched in May 2026, ranked first among Chinese models on LMArena text benchmarks and fourth globally, while the company launched its DuMate AI assistant in March and showed off Miaoda 3.0 and Famou Agent 2.0 at its Baidu Create 2026 developer conference (Baidu).

The Q2 miss and the class action

The crossover story wobbled in the second quarter. On August 18, Baidu reported Q2 revenue of RMB31.33 billion, down 4% from a year earlier and short of the LSEG consensus estimate of RMB31.96 billion. U.S.-listed shares fell 7% in early trading. The anatomy of the miss told the transition story in miniature: online marketing services fell 19% to RMB13.1 billion — the legacy ad business continuing to shrink under pressure from China’s property downturn — while the Core AI-powered business grew 25% to RMB12.5 billion. But 25% was itself a deceleration from the 49% pace of Q1, and net income collapsed to RMB2.3 billion from RMB7.3 billion a year earlier (Reuters).

CEO Robin Li used the moment to vow to bring ERNIE back to the AI frontier. Reuters reported that the chatbot had gone months without a major upgrade while rivals Alibaba and Moonshot shipped newer models — a frank admission of how crowded China’s foundation-model race had become (Reuters).

Then came the lawsuit. On September 28, 2026, the Robbins LLP law firm announced a securities class action on behalf of investors who bought Baidu’s American depositary shares between November 18, 2025, and August 17, 2026. The complaint alleged that Baidu had overstated the ability of its AI business to mitigate the decline of its legacy online marketing business. It cited the company’s own numbers: fourth-quarter 2025 revenue down more than 4% year over year to RMB32.74 billion (full year RMB129.079 billion), against management’s statement that the AI-powered business had grown 48% to RMB40 billion; and the Q2 2026 report showing General Business down 4% to RMB25.2 billion, Legacy down 23% to RMB10.4 billion, online marketing down 19% to RMB13.1 billion, with Core AI-powered business growth decelerating from 49% to 25% and AI Cloud Infrastructure falling 17% quarter over quarter to RMB7.3 billion. On the Q2 news, Baidu ADS fell $13.25 — 12.73% — to close at $90.87. The deadline to seek lead-plaintiff status is November 13, 2026 (Robbins LLP). These are the plaintiff’s allegations, not findings; no court has ruled on them.

Apollo Go’s global push

While the financial story turned, the robotaxi story accelerated. In the first quarter of 2026, Apollo Go — Baidu’s autonomous ride-hailing service — completed 3.2 million fully driverless rides, up more than 120% year over year, with a weekly peak above 350,000 rides in March (Baidu). By May 2026 the service operated in 27 cities; its cumulative autonomous mileage had reached 330 million kilometers, 220 million of them fully driverless. Fast Company ranked Apollo Go second globally in its 2026 automotive innovation list, alongside Waymo (Baidu).

August brought the international expansion into focus. Uber launched Apollo Go’s driverless taxis in Dubai — operating in Jumeirah and Umm Suqeim with the sixth-generation RT6 robotaxi, bookable through UberX, Uber Comfort, or a dedicated autonomous option — with plans to scale to thousands of vehicles. Dubai had issued its first fully-driverless testing permit in January 2026, and Apollo Go was by then present in 28 cities globally. A parallel deal with Dubai Taxi Company targets more than 1,000 driverless cabs, and a March 2026 partnership with Abu Dhabi’s K2 added the Emirati capital. The Dubai launch was a first for Baidu: the first city outside China running its dual model of self-operated and partner-based deployments, with Baidu vice president Nan Yang describing the company as “at a pivotal moment in autonomous mobility, scaling up rapidly to take our services global” (The National).

The Kunlunxin spin-off

Baidu’s other 2026 move was to start unwinding its AI hardware stack into the public markets. On January 1, 2026, the company confidentially filed a Hong Kong listing application for its AI chip subsidiary Kunlunxin as a proposed spin-off, confirming the filing the next day. Baidu stressed that the transaction was not finalized and would need regulatory approval, and said it expects Kunlunxin to remain a subsidiary even after any listing. Hong Kong-listed shares rose 7.5% on the news, and Jefferies raised its price target to $181 from $159, keeping a Buy rating (TS2 Tech).

By May, Kunlunxin was advancing a dual listing: it launched the STAR Market listing guidance process on May 7, 2026, alongside the Hong Kong track. Baidu remains the controlling shareholder with a 57.67% stake. Industry reporting put expected 2025 revenue above RMB3.5 billion with a path to breakeven — against roughly RMB2 billion in 2024 revenue and a RMB200 million net loss — and noted that external customers accounted for more than half of 2025 revenue, evidence that the chip unit was becoming a standalone commercial vendor rather than an internal supplier. Its roadmap includes the M100 inference chip in 2026 and the M300 for ultra-large multimodal training in 2027 (TrendForce).

The Amodei connection

One of the less-remarked threads in Baidu’s history ties it to the current AI era’s most safety-conscious CEO. Dario Amodei — co-founder and chief executive of Anthropic — entered the AI field in 2014 as a research scientist at Baidu, where he contributed to early work on scaling laws, the observation that bigger models, more data, and more compute yield predictable performance gains (Financial Express). A career dossier dates the Baidu stint to November 2014 through October 2015 (Clay). Amodei then joined Google Brain as a senior research scientist in 2015, became one of the first employees at OpenAI in 2016 — rising to vice president of research and leading GPT-2 and GPT-3 development — departed in late 2021, and co-founded Anthropic the same year with his sister Daniela and former OpenAI colleagues (Financial Express).

Origins and the company behind the numbers

Baidu.com was founded in 2000 by Robin Li — a former Infoseek engineer with a master’s in computer science from the State University of New York at Buffalo — and Eric Xu, a Texas A&M PhD who had worked at American biotech firms. By the time of its U.S. IPO plans in 2005, Xu had already left, and the company was the world’s sixth most-visited website on the strength of China’s 100 million-plus internet users. The name “Baidu” comes from a Song-dynasty poem, meaning “one hundred times” — a reference to a man ardently searching for his lover in a festival crowd. Google bought a 2.6% stake in 2004, but Baidu stayed independent (Taipei Times).

Today Li remains co-founder and CEO, with Haijian He as CFO, and the company trades on the Nasdaq as BIDU and on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange as 9888 — one American depositary share equals eight Class A ordinary shares (Baidu).

What this profile does not claim

This profile does not adjudicate the September 2026 securities class action — the allegations described are the plaintiff’s claims, and no court has ruled on them. It does not give Baidu’s current market capitalization or stock-price history beyond the specific figures cited above. It does not state the city of Baidu’s headquarters or its exact incorporation date; those were not verified against a fully-read source in this research. It makes no claims about the outcome of the Kunlunxin listing process, which was still pending regulatory steps at last report. And it takes no position on China’s internet-content regulation or the compliance debates around Chinese search engines — subjects outside the sourced scope of this profile.