Baidu just gave us a clean beat, a positive reaction, and a fresh reminder that the Chinese tech trade is not dead.
May 19, 2026
There are no S&P 500 earnings reactions to cover today, but we have something else important to talk about.
The United States and China are locked in a race for AI supremacy.
Right now, the U.S. has the lead, and Nvidia $NVDA is the king of the hill.
What's more, the hyperscalers are spending like mad, and the American AI infrastructure trade remains one of the strongest themes in the market.
But China is not sitting this out...
Look at the Nasdaq 100 of China $KSTR.
After spending years in the penalty box, KSTR is now flirting with a massive base breakout.
And while, in the short-term, this would be a logical level to consolidate, the long-term picture is very constructive.
We believe the Nasdaq 100 of China is on the cusp of a brand-new primary uptrend.
And if Chinese tech is entering a sustained markup phase, Baidu $BIDU belongs on the radar.
This is the Google of China, which has a whole alphabet soup of businesses.
Baidu does everything from search and AI to cloud, autonomous driving, robotaxis, and more.
And while the stock has been a mess for years, the chart is finally starting to look constructive again.
BIDU bottomed last April and doubled into its October peak.
Since then, BIDU has been digesting those gains within a tight sideways range at the volume-weighted average price anchored to the 2021 all-time high.
The longer BIDU sits at this level, the more important the eventual resolution becomes.
On Monday, the company gave us a reason to believe BIDU is about ready to blast off.
The company beat expectations across the board and rallied 1.8% in reaction to the news.
On our earnings scorecard, you can see the headline growth isn't very impressive.
But the market already knows that...
What matters now is whether Baidu’s AI businesses are big enough to change the story.
Baidu said its core AI-powered business grew revenue by 49% YoY.
What's more, AI accounted for more than half of the company's revenue for the first time.
In other words, Baidu is slowly turning into an AI company.
The biggest driver of growth is AI Cloud Infrastructure, which grew revenues by 79% YoY.
Within that segment, GPU Cloud revenue surged 184% YoY, and that is the part of the story the bulls care about.
Baidu is trying to reposition itself as a full-stack AI platform, with proprietary chips, cloud infrastructure, foundation models, AI agents, digital humans, and autonomous driving all working together.
Their hardware business is also crushing it.
Baidu’s Kunlunxin AI chips have already achieved large-scale commercial deployment in an AI computing cluster of more than 30,000 accelerators.
That matters in the context of the U.S.-China AI race.
If China needs more domestic AI infrastructure, Baidu has a seat at the table.
Then there's the robotaxi business, with 120% YoY growth in total rides.
As of April, they had exceeded 22 million cumulative public rides, and the company continues to push internationally, with progress in Switzerland, London, Dubai, and other markets.
Again, this is not showing up cleanly in the earnings growth yet, but we think it will soon.
Baidu is still being priced like an old Chinese internet company with shrinking legacy businesses.
Meanwhile, the business mix is shifting toward AI cloud, GPU infrastructure, AI applications, and robotaxis.
For BIDU, the line is clear.
If the stock can make a decisive move above $140, the path of least resistance will shift from sideways to higher for the foreseeable future.
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Happy Technical Tuesday
-The Beat Team
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