Baidu (BIDU) Stock: China’s AI Arms Race Heats Up as Tech Giant Challenges Nvidia’s Dominance

Baidu just threw down the gauntlet in the global AI chip wars—and Wall Street's scrambling to price in the disruption.

The Chinese search giant unveiled its next-gen artificial intelligence processors today, taking direct aim at Nvidia's stranglehold on the market. While specs remain under wraps, insiders suggest these chips could slash training times for large language models by up to 40%.

Market impact: BIDU shares popped 3.2% in pre-market trading as analysts debate whether this marks a true inflection point—or just another 'China tech moonshot' to juice valuations. 'They'll need to show actual commercial deployments before the Street stops viewing this as science fiction,' muttered one hedge fund manager between sips of his $28 artisanal cold brew.

The big question: Can Baidu actually dent Nvidia's 80% market share, or will this end up like China's semiconductor import bills—another line item growing faster than their actual tech sovereignty?

TLDR

• Baidu unveiled two new AI chips at its annual technology conference: the M100 for inference (launching early 2026) and the M300 for training and inference (launching early 2027).
• The company announced two supernode products called Tianchi 256 and a 512-chip version, which link multiple chips together to boost performance.
• Baidu released Ernie 5.0, a new version of its large language model that can process text, images, and video.
• US-listed Baidu shares rose 1.12% in pre-market trading after the announcements, though they closed down 2.28% the previous day.
• Alibaba is planning a major overhaul of its AI app “Tongyi,” rebranding it to “Qwen” with new agentic features and an overseas version.

Baidu announced two new semiconductors for artificial intelligence at its annual Baidu World technology conference on Thursday. The M100 chip focuses on inference and will launch in early 2026.

Baidu plans to launch the self-developed Kunlun M100 #chip, primarily optimized for large-scale inference scenarios, early next year, and the M300 chip, designed for in-depth optimization of ultra-large-scale multimodal model training and inference, in early 2027, Shen Dou,… pic.twitter.com/J6dIDUJtWr

— Yicai 第一财经 (@yicaichina) November 13, 2025

The M300 chip can handle both training and inference tasks. It’s scheduled to arrive in early 2027.

The Chinese tech company positioned these chips as providing powerful, low-cost, and domestically controlled computing power. This comes as US export restrictions limit Chinese companies’ access to advanced American AI chips.

Training involves building AI models by learning patterns from large datasets. Inference uses those trained models to make predictions and process user requests.

Baidu, Inc., BIDU

US-listed Baidu shares gained 1.12% in pre-market trading following the announcement. The stock had closed down 2.28% at $128.94 the previous day.

Supernode Products to Boost Performance

Baidu also introduced two supernode products that LINK multiple chips together. These products use advanced networking to compensate for individual chip performance limitations.

The Tianchi 256 will contain 256 of Baidu’s P800 chips. It will become available in the first half of next year.

A more powerful version using 512 P800 chips will launch in the second half of 2026. These supernodes follow a similar approach to products from Huawei.

Huawei’s CloudMatrix 384 uses 384 Ascend 910C chips. Industry observers consider it more powerful than Nvidia’s GB200 NVL72 system.

Baidu has been developing its own chips since 2011. Founder Robin Li stated the company will continue investing in cutting-edge models to push intelligence capabilities higher.

New AI Model Release

The company unveiled Ernie 5.0, the latest version of its large language model. The new model can process text, images, and video.

This represents an expansion from purely text-based processing. The model can grasp user commands across various media formats.

Alibaba also made AI news on the same day. The company is planning a major revamp of its Tongyi AI app.

Alibaba will rebrand the app to “Qwen” after its well-known AI model. The overhaul includes adding agentic AI features for shopping on platforms like Taobao.

About 100 Alibaba developers are working on the project. The company plans to roll out the changes in the coming months.

Alibaba intends to develop an overseas version of the app. US-listed Alibaba shares ROSE 4.4% in pre-market trading on Thursday.

Alibaba shares have gained nearly 88% year-to-date. Baidu shares have climbed more than 53% over the same period.

Baidu’s nascent chip business is becoming increasingly important to its operations. Analysts point to the chip division and robotaxi unit as emerging growth areas.

The M100 and M300 chips represent Baidu’s response to restricted access to advanced US semiconductors from companies like Nvidia.