With a rise of over 70% in a year, why is Baidu leading the global tech giants?

If you were to list the large internet technology companies in Hong Kong's stock market over the past year, you might be surprised by which one ranked first in terms of gains:

Baidu。

Over the past year, Baidu's stock price has risen more than 70%, leading large-cap Chinese technology stocks. If compared with the performance of the Mag 7 in the US stock market, Baidu’s stock price increase ranks third, only behind Google’s 163.3% and NVIDIA’s 84.5%, and ahead of fourth-place Apple by approximately 23 percentage points.

True value has always been hidden in non-consensus; and Baidu,is becoming the embodiment of non-consensus among global large-scale internet technology companies.。

Kunlun Chip, which originated in 2011, announced plans to split off and list independently in January 2026. In the first quarter of 2026, Baidu Intelligent Cloud once again secured the top spot in both the number and amount of domestic market bids. Recently, Wenxin Large Model 5.1 was officially released, achieving the top domestic ranking on the LMArena search list with only about 6% of the pre-training cost of similarly scaled models in the industry. Baidu’s DuMate topped the PinchBench evaluation benchmark for intelligent agents and occupied three out of the top five positions…

Application-first, full-stack self-research, and long-term investment are key points that Robin Li has repeatedly emphasized publicly, and these are now being validated one by one by the market. From the financial reports perspective, this company has shifted its disclosure perspective, adopting an AI-native classification centered around 'Baidu Core AI New Business,' providing a clear, quantifiable, and analyzable path for AI-driven business value.

Non-consensus does not remain non-consensus forever.Baidu AI Developer Conference Create 2026 is about to be held, and there will likely be significant announcements, formally opening the window for revaluation. The stock price has already been leading for a full year, and the next question for the market is how much Baidu's AI should be worth. This rise is just the beginning.

01 The Underlying Logic Behind the Leading Surge

Judging the disclosure approach and switching perspectives directly reveal what Baidu has done in the AI field and its achievements, a move overlooked by many but considered a masterstroke,directly allowing the company’s AI assets to be correctly valued.。

Extending into the 2025 annual report, Baidu's core AI new business reached 40 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 48%. The fastest-growing segment was AI-native marketing services, which jumped from 2.4 billion yuan to 9.8 billion yuan, marking a 301% year-on-year increase, nearly quadrupling in one year. Intelligent cloud infrastructure at 19.8 billion yuan (+34%) formed the base, while AI applications at 10.2 billion yuan remained stable. Zooming into quarterly performance, the pace intensified: Baidu’s core AI new business hit 9.6 billion yuan in Q3 alone and surged to 11.3 billion yuan in Q4, showing accelerating quarter-on-quarter growth.

Another set of data worth noting relates to Baidu’s flagship products: by October 2025, approximately 70% of mobile search result pages will include AI-generated content, and Baidu’s core search function has been completely restructured internally by AI.

Simultaneously, several organizational-level initiatives have been implemented. For instance, in its FY25 annual report, Baidu disclosed the establishment of the 'Personal Super Intelligence Business Group' (PSIG), integrating Baidu Wenku and Baidu Netdisk under this group to focus on the new track of 'super individuals' (OPC) in the AI era, leveraging intelligent agents to enable a single individual to achieve company-level productivity.

When examining disclosure standards, financial reporting figures, and organizational upgrades in the AI era together, it is evident that Baidu has completed a thorough AI restructuring, evolving into a native AI company: distinctly highlighted in financial reports, accounting for nearly half of main business revenue, and building an organization more suited for the AI era.AI within Baidu is no longer just a new growth curve but the core engine driving the entire system.。

The changes visible on the balance sheet are largely the result of over a decade of Baidu's deep investment in AI; within the 'chip-cloud-model' layout, Baidu's self-developed chips, which have long been bundled into the company’s financials, often leave the market unable to clearly assess their value.

In January 2026, Baidu officially announced plans to spin off its AI chip unit Kunlun Chip for an independent IPO. This company, initiated in 2011, has now been operating for 15 years, with cumulative deployments reaching tens of thousands of cards. The latest P800 large-scale training cluster achieves 32,000 cards per cluster with training efficiency exceeding 98%. In China Mobile’s 2025-2026 procurement for general computing equipment across three inference packages, Kunlun Chip secured leading shares of 70%/70%/100%, with order volumes reaching billions.

Investment banks have already separately calculated the market capitalization significance of this chip asset: JPMorgan values Kunlun Chip between 40 billion to 49 billion US dollars, while Haitong International estimates 48.7 billion US dollars. Using the exchange rate at the end of December 2025, this translates to approximately 280 to 340 billion RMB.This valuation approaches the market capitalization of a medium-sized independently listed company.The ability to value chips independently is itself one of the most tangible drivers behind Baidu’s recent market capitalization increase.

Looking at Baidu as a whole, professional institutions' valuation benchmarks for the parent company have also caught up. Benchmark raised its target price for Baidu’s US shares from $143.54 to $215, a 33% increase. CICC provided an SOTP valuation of $205 for the US shares and HK$196 for the Hong Kong shares, while ICBC International set their targets at $185 and HK$180 respectively. In just a short while, Create 2026 will be held, where there will be significant upgrades announced.

From multiple perspectives, Baidu has been leading the gains in Chinese tech stocks over the past year, with its underlying logic gradually materializing.

02 Leading industry insights

Imagine an entrepreneur whose judgments, when proposed, are often verified word-for-word by the direction of the entire industry one or two years later. Such accuracy is extremely rare in the tech world, but Robin Li falls into this category.

For example, in July 2024, everyone was competing on models that year. GPT-4o had just been released, Claude 3 was still catching up, DeepSeek was preparing to debut, and domestically, a new model was making headlines every week. At the main forum of the World Artificial Intelligence Conference, Robin Li made a statement: 'Don't focus on competing with models; focus on applications.' At the time, many people didn’t understand. The ceiling for models hadn’t been reached yet, so how could the application layer generate value before the model layer?

Looking back more than a year later, this insight has been validated and continues to deepen.At the Create Wuhan Conference in April 2025, he went further: 'There will be many models, but what will truly dominate this world is applications—applications are king.' Then, in November 2025 during an exclusive interview with GeekPark, he offered an even more direct conclusion: 'The biggest opportunity in AI lies in the application layer, not in the model layer or the chip layer.'

Breaking down the application layer further reveals the same principle. Looking at the industrial structure layer, at the 2025 Baidu World Conference, he provided a visual judgment: The AI industry structure is transitioning from an unhealthy 'pyramid' to a healthy 'inverted pyramid,' with the formula for value distribution being that models above chips must produce 10x value, and applications above models must create 100x value. In terms of application forms, he was already betting on intelligent agents at the 2024 Baidu World Conference, and by March 2025, this perspective was expanded in a signed article in the People's Daily, stating that '2025 might become the inaugural year for the explosion of AI agents.'

Investors familiar with AI's evolution over recent years should recognizethat none of these insights were market consensus at the time they were expressed.When an entrepreneur's unconventional ideas are repeatedly validated, they naturally become the non-consensus of a company. However, to truly transform this non-consensus into a company’s strategy, it takes more than just repeating the idea—it depends on how much real investment has been made.

Over the past decade, Baidu’s cumulative R&D investment has exceeded 180 billion yuan, establishing an extremely rare full-stack system on a global scale. This also represents its hardest-to-replicate core barrier in the AI era.

At the foundational 'chip' level, Kunlun Chip, after more than a decade of continuous investment, has undergone iterative improvements based on Baidu's real business scenarios and has completed the deployment of tens of thousands of cards.

At the 'cloud' level, Baidu Intelligent Cloud has ranked first in AI public cloud for several consecutive years. The Baike platform works deeply in synergy with Kunlun Chip, forming an integrated advantage of cost-effective computing power, model training and inference, and industry solutions. It has built deep competitive moats in industries such as central state-owned enterprises, manufacturing, and finance.

At the 'model' level, the release of Wenxin Yiyan 5.1 topped the charts once again, continuously driving dual progress in technical capabilities and application implementation.

At the 'system' level, Baidu was the first to invest heavily in the new application paradigm of intelligent agents in the AI era. It has built an Agent matrix around search, coding, digital humans, and evolving intelligent agents, not only starting early but also achieving extensive and profound coverage. Only a handful of companies globally, such as international giants like Google (TPU+Gemini), can achieve this.

03Conclusion

Baidu's AI Developer Conference Create 2026 is approaching. What will be showcased and what Robin Li will say will naturally be answered at the conference. However, the most direct way to predict whether these innovations will stand the test of time is to look back over the past decade: every judgment that no one was willing to make at the time is now being validated step by step.

Following the same judgment, the same level of investment, and the same cycle of execution, what will the next step be?

The complete answer will only emerge after Create 2026 concludes. However, the path toward re-evaluating Baidu's value has only just begun. $Baidu (BIDU.US)$$BIDU-SW (09888.HK)$

Disclaimer: This article is intended solely for learning and communication purposes and does not constitute investment advice.

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