- Chinese tech company Baidu, Inc BIDU voiced the "limited" impact of U.S. chip sanctions on its businesses during its third-quarter earnings call.
- In October, the U.S. imposed export controls limiting American businesses from selling semiconductors and chipmaking equipment to Chinese chip manufacturers.
- "We think the impact is quite limited in the near future," said Dou Shen, executive vice president and head of the AI Cloud group, in response to the embargo's impact on Baidu's ability to grow its artificial intelligence cloud computing arm and autonomous driving businesses.
- Also Read: Baidu's Q3 Top-Line Rises 2% As Core Revenue Resumed Positive Growth
- "A large portion of our AI Cloud business and even wider AI business does not rely too much on the highly advanced chips," said Shen.
- "For the part of our businesses that need advanced chips, we have already stocked enough in hand to support our business in the near term," he added.
- Shen added that Baidu developed its own AI chip, named Kunlun. He said Baidu has already started to use the Kunlun chip to support some large-scale AI-computing tasks internally and to serve external customers.
- "Because we have full stack of AI capabilities from chips to frameworks to foundation models and to application software, we can achieve much higher efficiency as we optimize the AI tasks from end to end," Shen said.
- He added that automotive chips are not on the prohibited list. "So, this means that in the near future, in-vehicle computing is not affected," he said.
- An analyst told CNBC's "Squawk Box Asia" that Baidu is "absolutely" a top pick, citing chip resilience as one of the reasons.
- "They are diversifying the manufacturing into their own facility and starting to use their own chips, Kunlun, for advanced applications," the report cited James Lee, a U.S. and China internet analyst from Mizuho.
- Price Action: BIDU shares closed higher by 0.55% at $95.08 on Tuesday.
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