Baidu (BIDU) (HK:9888) stock is soaring on Hong Kong trading after the Chinese tech giant unveiled two new advanced artificial intelligence (AI) processors at its annual Baidu World conference today. Baidu claims that these chips, M100 and M300, aim to offer Chinese firms cost-effective, powerful, and home-grown computing capabilities.
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Additionally, the company introduced new supercomputing products that use advanced networking to connect several chips and make up for the limits of each single chip. As the U.S. and China compete for dominance in AI, U.S. export restrictions on advanced AI chips have prompted Chinese companies to accelerate their own chip development.
Baidu’s Growing Role in AI Chips
Baidu has been developing chips for more than a decade, and its new chips position it as a key player in China’s semiconductor market. The M100 chip, made by its chip unit Kunlunxin, is designed to enhance inference for models using the mixture-of-experts method. Meanwhile, the M300 chip, which supports both training and inference, is built to train massive multimodal models with trillions of parameters.
The M100 is expected to launch in early 2026, while the M300 is planned for early 2027. The main difference between training and inference is that training teaches AI models with the help of large datasets, while inferencing uses those trained models to make predictions and handle user requests.
Baidu Launches Supercomputing System and Ernie 5.0
Baidu also announced its new supercomputing system, Tianchi 256, which combines 256 P800 chips to boost AI performance by more than 50 percent compared with the previous version. It is scheduled for release in the first half of 2026, followed by the more advanced Tianchi 512 in the second half. The company plans to build a supernode capable of connecting and supporting millions of chips by 2030.
In addition, Baidu introduced Ernie 5.0, a multimodal large language model (LLM) with 2.4 trillion parameters. The Ernie 5.0 is expected to be twice the size of rival Alibaba’s (BABA) Qwen3-Max and Moonshot AI’s Kimi K2. Chief technology officer Wang Haifeng said its ability to process text, code, audio, images, and video allows it to understand and create multimedia content seamlessly.
Chinese firms, including Huawei, are also advancing in developing AI chips and supercomputing nodes to reduce reliance on Nvidia’s (NVDA) products.
Is Baidu a Good Stock to Buy?
Analysts remain divided on Baidu’s long-term prospects. On TipRanks, BIDU stock has a Moderate Buy consensus rating based on 12 Buys, five Holds, and two Sell ratings. The average Baidu price target of $134.86 implies 4.6% upside potential from current levels. Year-to-date, BIDU stock has surged nearly 53%.
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