Baidu, Inc. BIDU

The business

Baidu sells two things wrapped in one ADR: a fading Chinese search-advertising monopoly (the cash cow) and a fast-growing AI Cloud plus autonomous-driving stack (the option). Today's engine is AI-related revenue inside Baidu Core, which crossed 52% of Core's General Business segment for the first time on the Q1 2026 print at roughly RMB 13.6B, up 49% YoY, with AI Cloud Infrastructure up 79% YoY and GPU Cloud up 184% YoY. iQIYI is a 50.4%-owned listed subsidiary best treated as a sum-of-parts (SOTP) stub; search advertising is in measured secular decline as Chinese user attention shifts to Douyin, WeChat in-app search, and Tmall. Rolled up, the 20% of the business doing 80% of the right-tail work is AI Cloud Infrastructure plus Apollo Go robotaxi, roughly $3.5 to $4B of run-rate revenue compounding 40 to 80% inside an $18B total business.

The qualitative fact the financials don't show but the math needs: Baidu is one of three Chinese players (with Huawei and Alibaba) running a domestically-fabricated AI stack from chip to model to cloud to autonomy, and that vertical integration is structurally captive because Nvidia top-tier silicon is export-controlled and US hyperscalers are walled out of sensitive Chinese workloads. What changed in the last two quarters: GPU Cloud revenue growth accelerated from triple-digit YoY in Q4 2025 to 184% in Q1 2026; Apollo Go ran 3.2M fully driverless rides in Q1 and crossed 22M cumulative rides through April; the Dubai standalone-app launch was the first commercial autonomous-ride-hailing footprint by any Chinese player outside China.