China’s Baidu says it expects ‘limited’ impact from U.S. chip curbs

“We think the impact is quite limited in the near future,” Dou Shen, executive vice president and head of Baidu AI Cloud, said of the U.S. chip export controls.

The impact from the U.S. chip sanctions on its businesses will be limited, according to a company executive.

In October, the United States imposed export controls on American businesses that wanted to sell to Chinese chipmakers.

In response to an audience member's question about how the curbs will affect Baidu's ability to grow its artificial intelligence cloud computing arm and autonomously driving businesses, the executive vice president and head of the Artificial Intelligence Cloud group said that the impact is limited in the near future.

The majority of our business is not dependent on the highly advanced chips. Apollo Go, a business run by Baidu, has been granted permits in Beijing, Wuhan and Yongchuan District to run a fully self-driving taxi service.

He said that they have enough in hand to support their business in the near term.

Kunlun is the artificial intelligence chip developed by Baidu. The Kunlun chip is being used to support some large-scale artificial intelligence-computing tasks inside and outside of the company.

We can achieve much higher efficiency because we have full stack of artificial intelligence capabilities from chips to frameworks to foundation models and to application software.

The chips are not on the banned list. In-vehicle computing is not going to be affected by this.

One of the reasons that an analyst thinks that Baidu is a top pick is chip resilience.

James Lee, a U.S. and China internet analyst, said that the company is starting to use their own chips for advanced applications.

The company posted a better-than- expected gain in revenue after cutting costs. Despite challenges such as Covid restrictions and inflation, online advertising performed better than anticipated.

The stock of the Chinese company is down 35.7% year to date.