China's search giant. Baidu's position in the country's internet economy has weakened as rivals have grown. Zhang Yaqin, a former boss of Baidu, is now at Tsinghua University.
In the first quarter of 2025 Baidu's cloud-computing revenue surged by 42% year on year, surprising analysts. The company has encouraged robotics firms onto its platform with a "multimodal" AI system that brings together language and vision models.
Baidu has said it will open-source the model behind Ernie, its chatbot. Baidu co-founded the OpenAtom Foundation alongside Huawei, Alibaba and Tencent.
Ernie is free to use, which is cannibalising its search business. A third of its search results in April 2025 came via generative AI, up from around 20% at the start of the year. Advertising revenue fell by 6% year on year in the first quarter of 2025, in contrast with Tencent's 20% growth.
Baidu runs Apollo Go, one of the world's largest robotaxi services, which has deployed more than 1,000 self-driving cars, mostly in China. Between April and June 2025 it provided 2.2m trips across 16 mostly Chinese cities—a two-fold increase on the same period in 2024. Apollo Go hopes to have 20,000 robotaxis operating worldwide by 2027. Baidu's RT6 robotaxi, made in partnership with Jiangling, a state-owned carmaker, costs just $35,000—far cheaper than Waymo's $130,000-200,000 vehicles.
Apollo Go began its first tests outside mainland China at the end of 2024 in Hong Kong. It has permission to test its vehicles in Abu Dhabi and Dubai, and has plans to start tests in Switzerland in partnership with PostBus, one of the country's biggest public-transport operators. Next year it may enter Britain and Germany in partnership with Lyft, an American ride-hailing company. Goldman Sachs expects the Chinese robotaxi industry's revenues to grow from a little over $50m to nearly $50bn by 2035, by which time a fleet of 1.9m robotaxis will account for 25% of all ride-hailing vehicles in China. Didi, which controls around 70% of China's ride-hailing market, is unlikely to open its platform to rivals as it seeks to protect its own lagging robotaxi efforts.
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