By Arjun Kharpal
Publication Date: 2025-11-28 06:20:00
A general view of the Baidu logo is seen at the Shanghai New Expo Center during the World Artificial Intelligence Conference 2025 in Shanghai, China, on July 28, 2025.
Ying Tang | Nurphoto | Getty Images
Tech giant Baidu is emerging as one of China’s key artificial intelligence chip players, positioning itself as a challenger to Huawei as both look to fill the void left by industry leader Nvidia being kept out of the country.
Best-known as China’s biggest search business, Baidu has in recent years refocused its business around driverless cars and AI, including a majority-owned subsidiary, Kunlunxin, which designs chips.
Several analysts have upgraded their outlook on Baidu’s stock over the past few weeks, citing the semiconductor business and forecasting the unit will gain more domestic orders.
This month, Baidu laid out a five-year roadmap for its Kunlun AI chips, beginning with the M100 in 2026 and the M300 in 2027. The company already uses a mix of its self-developed chips in its data centers to run its ERNIE AI models, as well as Nvidia products.
Baidu makes money by selling its chips to third parties building data centers as well as renting out computing capacity via its cloud. It has sought to position itself as a so-called “full stack” AI offering with infrastructure made up of chips, servers and data centers, as well as AI models and applications.
And the chip business appears to be gaining traction. Earlier this year, Kunlunxin won orders from suppliers to China…
