Baidu announced second-quarter 2026 results on 18 August 2026, furnished to the SEC on Form 6-K. Total revenue was RMB31.3 billion (4.62 billion US dollars), down 4 percent year over year and 2 percent sequentially. Revenue from AI Cloud Infra was RMB7.3 billion, up 50 percent year over year, and within it revenue from GPU Cloud, which Baidu previously called subscription-based revenue from AI accelerator infrastructure, rose 283 percent year over year, accelerating from 184 percent growth in the previous quarter. Revenue from AI Applications was RMB2.5 billion, up 3 percent, and AI-native marketing services were roughly flat at RMB2.6 billion.
The offsetting decline is in the legacy business. Online marketing services revenue was RMB13.1 billion, down 19 percent year over year, and fell from 62 percent of Baidu General Business revenue a year ago to 52 percent. Operating income was RMB3.0 billion at a 10 percent margin, and net income attributable to Baidu was RMB2.3 billion (342 million dollars) at a 7 percent net margin. CFO Haijian He noted operating cash flow stayed positive for a fourth consecutive quarter at RMB3.4 billion, and said Baidu’s conversion to a dual-primary Hong Kong listing is expected to become effective within the year, subject to a shareholder vote set for 26 August 2026 and exchange approval.
Baidu’s own framing is a crossover. CEO Robin Li said the growing momentum in the core AI-powered business “reaffirms Baidu’s transition from an internet-centric company to an AI-first company,” and the company highlights that Baidu Core AI-powered Business revenue of RMB12.5 billion now accounts for about half of Baidu General Business revenue. The robotaxi unit Apollo Go reported a wide international push in the quarter: open-road testing in London with Uber and Lyft, fully driverless commercial operations in Dubai with rides available through Uber, the first fully driverless testing permits in Hong Kong, testing in Switzerland with PostBus, and an MoU in Kazakhstan. Baidu says Apollo Go now covers 28 cities with over 350 million autonomous kilometres, of which over 240 million are fully driverless. These operational figures come from internal management accounts and are unaudited.
For a leader the useful comparison is with Alibaba’s quarter reported two days later. Both Chinese platforms are showing AI compute revenue accelerating hard off a small base while their traditional monetisation engines weaken, but Baidu is doing it with total revenue shrinking rather than growing. A 283 percent GPU cloud growth rate is impressive and also arithmetically easy at this size; what it does not yet do is replace a 19 percent decline in an advertising business several times larger. The transition Baidu describes is real in direction and unfinished in magnitude, and the dual-primary listing move suggests the company expects to need flexible access to capital while it completes it.