Photo by JPMorgan pushed Baidu into a new lane on Monday after reviewing fresh market data, according to CNBC.
The bank raised its call on the company from neutral to overweight and lifted its price target on the U.S.-listed shares to $188 from $110, pointing to 69% upside.
The move came after analyst Alex Yao said he expects Baidu’s next phase to be driven by cloud services and AI systems, not the company’s older, slower lines of business.
Alex said the market is not pricing this shift at all and said investors may want to look again because the company is preparing for stronger years.
Alex said Baidu’s cloud revenue could grow from 23% in 2025 to 61% in 2026, which he tied to rising sales of the company’s Kunlun AI chips. He said, “We believe domestic demand for AI compute in China remains intense, and hyperscalers are increasingly sourcing from local solution providers.”
He also said, “In addition, we expect GPU compute revenue will maintain triple-digit growth given enterprise mania for model training, fine-tuning and inference.” He said Baidu is preparing for bigger demand from companies that want to train their own models with local hardware instead of importing chips or renting foreign compute.
Tracking Baidu’s AI and cloud expansion
Alex said Baidu is also pushing deeper into AI-native marketing, which he expects to grow 55% year-over-year in 2026. He added two warnings when he explained the new advertising setup. He said, “First, the expansion in AI-based ad services is likely to cannibalize the legacy search advertising business.”
He then said, “Second, there remains uncertainty around when and at what level traditional search ads will stabilize.” Baidu’s shares in the U.S. are up 32% this year, with another 3% premarket gain showing up after JPMorgan changed its view. LSEG data shows 24 out of 33 analysts covering the company now call it a buy or strong buy.
While Baidu was getting a fresh outlook, Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. was stacking downloads at a speed that pushed it into the news on its own. Alibaba said its Qwen app picked up more than 10 million downloads in a week after the company relaunched and renamed its older apps on iOS and Android. The relaunch gave Alibaba a single AI-facing product under one name. Shares of Alibaba jumped more than 5% in Hong Kong after the company shared the download figures in a WeChat post.
Tracking Alibaba’s Qwen rollout and investor expectations
Qwen’s early numbers place it among the fastest-growing AI apps in China, where ChatGPT is not available. ChatGPT reached 100 million users three years ago, and only Meta’s Threads climbed at a similar speed because it was pushed through the company’s existing social networks.
Strategist Kenny Ng from China Everbright Securities International said, “Whether or not they can leverage the Qwen app to drive their to-consumer business will be an important factor influencing the company’s future valuation,” adding that the market is watching Qwen because of how often the company is compared with OpenAI.
Alibaba’s weekend update lined up with new numbers from Ant Group, its fintech affiliate, which launched its own multimodal assistant called LingGuang.That app reached more than one million downloads in four days.
Alibaba said it will keep adding new agentic AI tools to Qwen over the next few months to support online shopping across its biggest platforms, including Taobao. The company said it wants Qwen to act as a full AI agent when the updates are done.
Chief Executive Officer Eddie Wu has already told investors that the company is now an AI‑first business.
Alibaba said in a statement that it plans to “deeply integrate core lifestyle and productivity services (including digital maps, food delivery, travel booking, office tools, e-commerce, education, and health guidance) directly into the Qwen App” as it prepares to take questions after releasing quarterly earnings on Tuesday.
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