Spending on artificial intelligence helped give some Chinese tech companies a boost in the first quarter, despite economic headwinds. “The standout for this [first quarter] reporting season was the growth in cloud business for Alibaba and Baidu ,” said Brian Tycangco, an analyst at Stansberry Research. Alibaba said earlier this month its cloud revenue in the latest quarter rose by 18% year on year , while Baidu on Wednesday said its AI cloud business grew by 42% . “At these rates of growth,…