Baidu, Inc. (NASDAQ:BIDU) reported fourth-quarter financial results before the market open on Thursday. The transcript from the company’s earnings call has been provided below.
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Juan Lin (Director of Investor Relations)
Hello and thank you for standing by for Baidu’s fourth quarter and fiscal year 2025 earnings conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen only mode. After management’s prepared remarks, there will be a question and answer session. Today’s conference is being recorded. If you have any objections, you may disconnect at this time. I would now like to turn the meeting over to your host for today’s conference, Juan Lin, Baidu’s Director of Investor Relations. Hello everyone and welcome to Baidu’s fourth quarter and fiscal year 2025 earnings conference call. Baidu’s earnings release was distributed earlier today and you can find a copy on our website as well as on newswire services. On the call today we have Robin Lee, our co Founder and CEO Julius Luong Luo, our EVP in charge of Baidu Mobile Ecosystem Group mega, our EVP in charge of Baidu AI Cloud Group ACG and Henry Haifeng, our cfo. After our prepared remarks, we will hold a Q and A session. Please note that the discussion today will contain forward looking statements made under the safe harbor provisions of the U.S. Private Securities Litigation Reform act of 1995. Forward looking statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results to differ materially from our current expectations. For detailed discussions of these risks and uncertainties, please refer to our latest Annual report and other filings with SEC and Hong Kong Stock Exchange. Baidu does not undertake any obligation to update any forward looking statements except as required under applicable law. Our earnings press release and this call includes discussions of certain unaudited non GAAP financial measures. Our press release contains a reconciliation of the unaudited non GAAP measures to the audited most directly comparable GAAP measures and is available on our IR website at ir.baidu.com As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. In addition, a webcast of this conference call will be available on Baidu’s IR website. I will now turn the call over to our CEO Robin.
Robin Li (Co-Founder and CEO)
Hello everyone. In Q4 Baidu General business total revenue was RMB 26.1 billion. Revenue from our core AI power business exceeded RMB 11 billion, accounting for 43% of Baidu General Business revenue in AI Cloud infrastructure subscription based revenue from AI accelerator infrastructurestructure grew 143% year over year, accelerating further from 128% in Q3. Meanwhile, Apollo Go maintained its robust momentum, delivering 3.4 million fully driverless operational rides in the quarter Total rides increased by over 200% year over year 2025 marked the third year of our journey in Genai and a pivotal year where AI became the new core of our portfolio. In 2025, we made substantial progress in scaling AI across our businesses, accelerating AI cloud growth, expanding robotaxi operations with improved unit economics and deepening AI integration into our mobile ecosystem. Looking at our portfolio through an AI native lens, momentum across our core AI powered businesses and continue to build in 2025 AI Cloud Infra gained strong traction through its highly efficient and cost effective training and inference capabilities. Revenue from AI Cloud Infra reached approximately RMB 20 billion in 2025, up 34% year over year, outpacing industry growth. Our AI application portfolio is among the most comprehensive in the industry, combining AI empowered flagship products with AI native offerings that unlock entirely new use cases. For the full year 2025, revenue from AI applications exceeded RMB10 billion. Apollo Go achieved a significant landmark. We delivered over 10 million fully driverless operational rides in 2025 alone. To date, Apollo Go has provided a total of over 20 million rides to the public. Cumulatively, with our accelerated global expansion, Apollo GO’s footprint has now reached 26 cities worldwide, reinforcing our leadership in autonomous ride hailing services. Lastly, our AI native marketing services including digital humans and agents sustained strong growth with revenue up 110% year over year. Collectively, these results demonstrate AI’s growing contribution to Baidu’s value creation and our ability to translate AI capabilities into scalable commercial impact. Now let me share the key highlights of the quarter starting with our proprietary AI chips. This quarter we announced the proposed spin off and separate the listing of kunlunxing. After more than a decade of steadfast investment in self developed AI chips, we are proud to see the market increasingly recognize their value and proven performance. This milestone validates our long term strategic vision and unlocks new opportunities for value creation. Our AI chips are built on a proprietary architecture developed in house from day one. They deliver stable high performance AI computing at scale with broad compatibility across different models and frameworks. This enables customers to deploy faster with lower integration costs. What distinguishes our AI chips is a proven track record of large scale real world deployments with leading enterpridess across diverse industries spanning financial services, telecommunications, energy and Internet sectors. Customers choose our chips for reliable performance, stable supply at scale, exceptional software compatibility and strong efficiency, especially in inference workloads. Looking ahead, we see significant opportunities for both Baidu and Kunlunxing as AI infrastructurestructure demand continues to accelerate. Next I will turn to our AI cloud infrastructurestructure. Our infrastructurestructure is among the most advanced in China, powered by a diverse mix of domestic and international high performance computing resources. In Q4, subscription based revenue from AI accelerator infrastructurestructure grew 143% year over year, achieving triple digit growth for the full year.
Automate operational compliance and safety checks through intelligent visual analysis. While known brands across coffee chains, quick service restaurants and fine dining are now using ETN to ensure high standard operations across their thousands of locations. Another example is FM Agent, our self-evolving agent designed to solve complex operational challenges by autonomously reasoning across data, rules and real-world constraints. It simulates countless scenarios to identify best solutions. We’ve seen strong validation both internally through our own cloud resource optimization and externally across industries like manufacturing, energy, finance and logistics, where efficiency improvement is a universal priority. On the organizational front, we recently established the Personal Super Intelligence Business Group or psig. Personal Super Intelligence Group Unified Baidu, Wen Gu and Baidu Drive are two flagship consumer-facing AI applications. Even before this organizational integration, the two teams had already collaborated at the product level to deliver innovations like Free Canvas and gemflow. This new group enables even deeper collaboration going forward as we accelerate the rollout of new applications to foster a robust growth curve driven by application layer innovation. Shifting to Physical AI Apollo Go represents our largest AI application in the physical world. 2025 was a year of accelerated scaling for Apollo Go, where we reinforced our leadership in operational scale and achieved significant progress in global expansion. We continue to expand fully driverless operations at pace delivering 3.4 million fully driverless operational rides in Q4 with weekly rides peaking at over 300,000. Total rides grew by over 200% year over year. Cumulative rides provided to the public have surpassed 20 million as of February 2026, firmly cementing our position as the world’s leading autonomous ride-hailing service provider. We entered 2026 with momentum across key international markets. In the UK, we advanced our partnerships with Uber and Lyft, moving forward with plans to pilot autonomous vehicles in London with testing expected to begin in the first half of 2026. This represents an important step in Apollo GO’s international expansion, extending our right-hand drive robo taxi capabilities from Hong Kong to another strategically important market In Switzerland. We initiated testing in St. Gallen. Following our market entry last quarter in the Middle East, we achieved progress in both Abu Dhabi and Dubai. In Abu Dhabi, we launched a fully autonomous ride-hailing services on Yas Island. In January with Autogo in Dubai, we secured the city’s first fully driverless testing permit from the Roads and Transport Authority. We also announced the next phase of our global partnership with Uber to bring our fully autonomous ride-hailing services to Dubai via the Uber platform. These are critical milestones that accelerate our progress across the Emirates. In Asia, we entered a new market, South Korea, starting with the Seoul metropolitan area, further expanding our presence across the Asian region. Meanwhile in Hong Kong, we expanded our open road testing into Sunwen and initiated cross-district testing between Airport island and Tung Chung, bringing us closer to commercial readiness there. As of February 2026, Apollo GO’s global footprint reached 26 cities, demonstrating the scalability of our autonomous driving technology across diverse regulatory and operational environments. Looking ahead, we are focused on accelerating expansion to more cities globally while continuously improving operational excellence and unit economics. Our growing experience across diverse markets gives us confidence in our ability to scale further, and we expect more cities to achieve positive unit economics over time. Underpinning this expansion, safety remains our top priority and the foundation of everything we do. Our autonomous ride-hailing service is the safest globally with our fully driverless vehicles experience an airbag deployment accident only once every over 12 million kilometers. As we scale, we will continue strengthening safety standards and ensure sustained reliability. Ultimately, our mission is to harness AI to transform mobility, making it fundamentally safer, more affordable and more comfortable, and improving how billions of people move, work and live. In summary, with AI now firmly integrated across our portfolio, we believe we are well positioned …