Baidu Goes All-In On "AI In Action", Unveils 2.4 Trillion Parameter Model And Aggressive Robotaxi Expansion
In a comprehensive research note released on November 13, 2025, analysts at UBS have provided a detailed look inside Baidu World 2025, the annual flagship event for China's search and AI giant. Themed "AI in Action," the event and the corresponding analysis signal a critical strategic pivot for Baidu, away from theoretical model development and towards tangible, application-driven monetization. For investors tracking the global AI race, Baidu’s aggressive roadmap is a noteworthy development, suggesting the industry is accelerating its shift from valuing infrastructure to valuing real-world outcomes.
At the core of this strategic push is the launch of a formidable new AI model and a clear-eyed view on where future revenue will be generated. As UBS notes, Baidu is positioning itself to capture value as the market matures beyond simply selling processing power.
Management believes that model intelligence is translating into practical, outcome-driven solutions at an accelerating pace, and that industry revenue opportunities will gradually transition from the chip layer toward the model and application layers. During the event, Baidu launched its new flagship AI model ERNIE 5.0, with 2.4trn parameters and native multimodality, which excels in multimodal understanding, instruction following, and creative writing.
From Search To "Digital Humans"
The "AI in Action" mantra is not mere marketing; it reflects a deep and ongoing transformation of Baidu's core business lines. The company's legacy search engine is already heavily infused with AI, but its ambitions now extend to novel user interfaces and global markets. UBS highlights the company's focus on "digital humans" as a key growth vector beyond simple chatbots, with plans for international expansion.
Baidu continues to deepen the AI transformation on search (reaching c70%), shifting from text-based results to AI-generated output... Baidu also views digital humans have broad use cases across e-commerce, education, healthcare and customer services, and have potential to become an innovative user interface beyond chatbots. Baidu plans to globalize its advanced digital human capabilities, starting with Brazil and expanding into Southeast Asia and the US, with potential integration with overseas e-commerce platforms.
Building The Full Stack: From Silicon to Superclusters
Underpinning these ambitious applications is Baidu's continued investment in building a vertically integrated AI infrastructure. Rather than relying entirely on external providers, the company is developing its own stack, from custom silicon to massive computing clusters. This strategy provides a defensive moat and a long-term strategic advantage, giving it control over its technological destiny. The report details a clear roadmap for its Kunlun chips and Tianchi computing nodes.
Management highlighted Baidu’s full-stack AI infrastructure capability, spanning chips, supernodes, ultra-large clusters and the Baige computing platform. On AI chips, Baidu Kunlun's existing P800 has been deployed across 100+ customers, with plans to launch the new M100 in early 2026 for large-scale inference workloads (e.g., MoE), followed by M300 in early 2027 to support multimodal model training and inference. On Supernodes, Baidu released 32-card and 64-card P800-based nodes in April 2025 and plans to further scale up by launching Tianchi 256/512 in 2026, enabling trillion-parameter model training.
Robotaxis Hit The Road, And The World
Perhaps the most tangible demonstration of Baidu's "AI in Action" is its autonomous driving unit, Apollo Go. The scale and progress reported by the company are significant, with operational metrics that now reportedly surpass some of its most prominent U.S. competitors. With a clear path toward monetization and initial forays into international markets, the robotaxi division is moving from a long-term "moonshot" to a strategic business with tangible revenue potential.
On operating scale, Apollo Go has recorded 250k weekly fully driverless orders, over 17m cumulative rides (surpassing Waymo) across 22 cities, and over 140m km of accumulative fully driverless mileage. Internationally, Apollo Go has commenced commercial operation in Abu Dhabi, and announced operational plans in Switzerland in Oct.
In sum, the dispatch from Baidu World 2025 paints a picture of a company aggressively executing on a strategy to translate its years of AI research—supported by a projected common shareholder equity of RMB 280 billion (approximately US$38.8 billion) by year-end 2025—into a diverse portfolio of monetizable products, from its core search business and video platform iQIYI to the frontier of autonomous mobility. The focus is no longer just on having the biggest model, but on putting that model to work.