led by Robin Li
Baidu profile, products and governance
Beijing AI group behind the ERNIE models and Apollo Go robotaxis
Hokai's read on Baidu
Worth knowing if you follow Chinese AI: Baidu pairs a large search business with its own ERNIE models and cloud, and about 33,500 staff. It also runs driverless taxis in 28 cities. Its own results say the search-ad side is under pressure while AI cloud revenue grows.
Baidu products
Models from Baidu
| Model | Lab | Context | In / out per 1M | Reads and writes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
 ERNIE-5.5-Flash-PreviewBaidu's text-only preview mixture-of-experts model, served through Qianfan on OpenRouter with a 1M-token context window and tool calling. | Baidu | 1M | $0.28 / $1.13 | text → text |
Key products, as the company lists them
| Product | What it is |
|---|---|
| ERNIE | Foundation model family |
| Baidu AI Cloud | Cloud infrastructure and AI platform |
| Apollo Go | Autonomous ride hailing service |
Baidu facts
- Company type
- Bigtech
- Founded
- 2000
- Headquarters
- Beijing, China
- Led by
- Robin Li
- Team size
- 5000+ (about 33,500 at 31 Dec 2025)
- Stock ticker
- NASDAQ:BIDU
- Funding
- Public company (Nasdaq: BIDU; HKEX: 9888); no venture rounds disclosed on its investor pages
Baidu releases
Every model Hokai holds for this company that carries a release date, newest first.
- Preview ERNIE-5.5-Flash-Preview released
Not sure which product fits?
Questions about Baidu
How much has Baidu raised and what is it worth?
Baidu is a listed company, so it has no venture rounds to report, and its investor pages disclose none. Its value is its market capitalisation, which moves daily on Nasdaq (BIDU) and the Hong Kong Stock Exchange (9888), so Hokai does not print a figure. Baidu says it returned US$259 million through buybacks from the start of 2026 to mid-August 2026.
Is Baidu publicly traded, and where?
Yes. Baidu's American depositary shares have traded on Nasdaq since August 2005 under BIDU, and one ADS represents eight Class A ordinary shares. Its Hong Kong listing began in March 2021 and became a dual-primary listing on 31 August 2026 under 9888 for the HKD counter and 89888 for the RMB counter.
What are the ERNIE models and how do they relate to Baidu?
ERNIE is the family of foundation models Baidu develops in-house, and ERNIE Bot is the consumer app built on it. Baidu's ERNIE site lists ERNIE 5.0, ERNIE 5.1 (announced 9 May 2026) and ERNIE 5.5 Flash Base (5 November 2026), plus an image model, ERNIE-Image, announced on 15 April 2026.
What is Apollo Go?
Apollo Go is Baidu's autonomous ride-hailing service. By mid-2026 Baidu counted 28 cities and more than 350 million autonomous kilometres, of which over 240 million were fully driverless. It has started fully driverless commercial service in Dubai, where rides are also bookable through the Uber app.
Does Baidu still make most of its money from search ads?
Baidu says its online marketing business remains under pressure, and that its core AI-powered business, with revenue of RMB 12.5 billion in the second quarter of 2026, now accounts for half of Baidu General Business revenue. Baidu General Business has made up over 70% of group revenue in the past three years, with iQIYI as the other segment.
About Baidu
Baidu is a Beijing AI and internet company, founded in 2000 and run by co-founder Robin Li. It builds the ERNIE foundation models, the PaddlePaddle framework, Baidu AI Cloud and the Apollo Go robotaxi service, and describes its AI stack as four layers from cloud to applications.
In their words
To make the complicated world simpler through technology.
Baidu is a Beijing-headquartered AI and internet company, incorporated in 2000 and led by co-founder Robin Li as chairman and chief executive, with Haijian He as chief financial officer. Baidu describes itself as a leading AI company with a strong internet foundation, and says it has invested in AI since 2010. It reports about 33,500 full-time employees as of 31 December 2025, and offices in Shanghai, Guangdong, Japan, the USA, Thailand, Brazil, Egypt and Indonesia.
Read the full background
Baidu says it offers a full AI stack of four layers: cloud infrastructure, the PaddlePaddle deep learning framework, its self-developed ERNIE foundation models, and applications. Its General Business is built around a mobile ecosystem (Baidu App, ERNIE Bot, Haokan, Baidu Post), an AI Cloud (infrastructure, plus Baidu Wenku and Baidu Drive), and intelligent driving, including the Apollo Go robotaxi service and the DuerOS assistant. A second segment, iQIYI, is an online video service. The Baidu AI Cloud and the ERNIE model family are where developers meet the company; the ERNIE site lists the current lineup.
Recent moves, all dated on Baidu's own pages: ERNIE 5.0, described as a 2.4 trillion-parameter unified multimodal model, was written up on 6 February 2026; ERNIE-5.1-Preview was announced on 30 April 2026 as the top Chinese model on the LMArena text leaderboard, and ERNIE 5.1 was announced as officially released on 9 May 2026. ERNIE 5.5 Flash Base followed on 5 November 2026, and a research post on automated AI research, ERNIE Evolve, on 9 November 2026. In June 2026 Baidu launched an enterprise edition of DuMate, its general-purpose productivity agent.
Baidu is a listed company, not a venture-backed startup, so there is no funding round to report. It has traded on Nasdaq since August 2005 (ticker BIDU) and has been listed in Hong Kong since March 2021 (HKEX: 9888); on 31 August 2026 that Hong Kong listing converted to dual-primary. Baidu says it returned US$259 million to shareholders through share repurchases from the start of 2026 through its second quarter results of 18 August 2026.
In its second quarter 2026 results, Baidu reported AI Cloud Infra revenue of RMB 7.3 billion, up 50% year over year, with GPU Cloud up 283%. Revenue from its core AI-powered business reached RMB 12.5 billion, which Baidu says is half of its General Business revenue. Apollo Go reports a footprint of 28 cities and over 350 million autonomous kilometres, including testing with Uber and Lyft in London and driverless commercial operations in Dubai.
Where it is weaker, on Baidu's own numbers: it says its online marketing business, the search-ad engine, remains under pressure, and AI Applications revenue grew only 3% year over year to RMB 2.5 billion. Its LMArena claim is for the top Chinese model, not the top model overall. Chinese cloud customers can buy models and GPU capacity from Alibaba Cloud instead. ERNIE Bot meets chat apps backed by Tencent and by ByteDance for the same users. Developers weighing closed APIs can look at open-weight models from DeepSeek first, and a buyer after a smaller consumer-focused model house will find Moonshot AI or MiniMax on Hokai. Outside mainland China, Baidu's search business faces Google. The big tech directory lists other companies of this scale.
Sources and guides
Official sources
- Company website Official
- Engineering blog Blog
Everything on this page (funding, leadership, compliance posture, the product list) is read from Baidu's own pages and filings, or from the Hokai records for the products it ships. A field the company does not publish is left off the page rather than guessed at.
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