China’s Baidu beats revenue estimates on strong cloud, AI demand

China’s Baidu Inc reported quarterly revenue above Wall Street expectations on Wednesday, helped by a recovery in advertising and an uptick in demand for its cloud services and artificial intelligence platforms.

The results come at a time when Baidu is beefing up its autonomous and smart transportation technology to tap into the fast-growing electric-vehicle market and diversify its sources of revenue.

As the domestic economy recovers, the Beijing-based company’s investments in non-core businesses is also helping it fend off competition to its core search platform from rivals Alibaba, Tencent Holdings and ByteDance, whose products are equally popular.