BAIDU : Baidu Create 2026 AI Developer event takeaways: The dawn of exponential growth of AI applications

Research evidence excerpt

BAIDU : Baidu Create 2026 AI Developer event takeaways: The dawn of exponential growth of AI applications

EQUITIES

INTERNET & MEDIA

BAIDU OUTPERFORMPRICE* HKD137.5  TARGET PRICE HKD162 (UPSIDE 18%)

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FLASH NOTE

Baidu Create 2026 AI Developer event takeaways: The dawn of

exponential growth of AI applications

15 MAY 2026 Securities Research Report Production time: 02:28* (London time)

Research Analyst & Publishing Entities

Colin LIU BNP Paribas Securities (Asia) Limited +852 2825 1083 colin.liu@asia.bnpparibas.com

What happened?

Baidu hosted its Create 2026 event for AI developers, customers and partners in Beijing in May 13-14.

BNNP View

Our major takeaway is that agentic applications are coming into a better shape, becoming better packaged and more

commercially ready at an industry level in China, though we still want to give credit to Baidu’s own R&D. On AI hardware,

we found most stakeholders view localisation as a strategic priority and are unlikely to be impacted by the clearance of

Nvidia’s H200 sales to China Internet companies (China Internet: The clearance of H200 sales to China provides more

conviction on cloud revenue growth into 2H26).

Key points from the CEO’s keynote and our high-level thoughts.

1) The evolving AI portal: Robin Li, Baidu’s CEO, noted that the future portal to general-purpose agents must be

very distinct from AI chatbots. Over the last two years, we have seen major Chinese Internet players investing

billions with goals to turn their AI chatbots into China’s ChatGPT. There have always been doubts from investors

whether the ROI could be justified, particularly considering monetising Chinese consumers via a subscription model

has proved to be challenging.