(Sept 1): Baidu Inc’s finance chief said the company’s investment in AI could soon generate profits and cash payback on par with those of its legacy search business, justifying a hard-fought transition from its internet roots.

Baidu’s AI-driven revenue — spanning from cloud computing to applications — now accounts for more than half of its sales and chief financial officer Henry He expects the upward trend to persist. The profit margin on its AI revenue could match that of its search business in the near term, given stronger demand for its cloud and chips, he said. Meanwhile, investments in new GPU clusters hosting AI services could fully pay for themselves in two to three years, he said, echoing larger rival Alibaba Group Holding Ltd.

“Our cloud revenue will be at a good level of increasing — and at least faster than the industry average in the next few quarters — and our capex spending will be lower than the market’s expectation,” He told Bloomberg Television. “So a smarter way, less spending, higher growth.”

Baidu is racing to catch up with rivals in the post-ChatGPT era. Its Ernie series of foundation models has fallen behind open-weight competitors such as Alibaba and Moonshot while traditional advertising revenue is on a steady decline as users flock to AI chatbots like ByteDance Ltd’s Doubao. Billionaire founder Robin Li is betting the competitive battlefield will shift to AI agents and applications, sparking a land grab that could drive growth for its cloud unit.

Li is also relying on his CFO to spearhead new financial initiatives. On Tuesday, the Beijing-based company gained primary listing status on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. The conversion is expected to allow Baidu to join Hong Kong’s Stock Connect programme next week, enabling mainland Chinese investors to buy its shares — a move He sees as an opportunity for the market to re-evaluate the stock.

Since joining Baidu in July 2025, the finance chief has also driven plans for an independent listing of Baidu’s Kunlunxin chip subsidiary as well as a US$5 billion (RM20.18 billion) share repurchase programme along with the company’s first-ever dividend policy.

Under He, Baidu has demonstrated capital discipline. The company holds US$40 billion in cash and liquid investments — a stockpile greater than its market capitalisation — and has generated positive operating cash flow throughout his tenure. He said he will refrain from issuing multiyear capital expenditure guidance or spending “unlimited resources” on training state-of-the-art AI models.

Beyond the Kunlunxin IPO, He said he’s considering capital market options for several of Baidu’s other assets but declined to provide specifics.

While internet companies have traditionally been treated as value stocks priced on price-to-earnings multiples, Baidu’s evolution into a deep-tech player means investors should value its individual divisions — from chips to autonomous driving — separately, He said.

“Among today’s Chinese tech companies, Baidu is the only one with full-stack AI capabilities — spanning chips, cloud infrastructure, physical-world applications, autonomous agents and proprietary foundation models,” He said. “Because Baidu has been public for 21 years, many investors still view us as a traditional value stock.”

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