China's Baidu Anticipates Minimal Impact from US Chip Sanctions

A senior executive from Chinese internet giant Baidu stated on Tuesday during a Q&A portion of its third quarter results call that the company anticipates a minimal impact from US chips sanctions, according to a report by CNBC.

The United States announced export restrictions in October that prevent American companies from supplying semiconductors and equipment for chip manufacturing to Chinese chip producers.

"Quite Limited"

When asked how the restrictions will influence Baidu's capacity to expand its autonomous driving business and artificial intelligence cloud computing, arm-both of which depend on cutting-edge AI chips-executive vice president Dou Shen said that the impact is "quite limited in the near future."

According to Shen, a significant chunk of their AI Cloud business and other AI-related ventures does not rely heavily on cutting-edge chips.

One of those businesses is Apollo Go, a robotaxi company owned by Baidu. It has obtained licenses from Beijing, Wuhan, and the Yongchuan District of Chongqing to operate a fully autonomous commercial robotaxi service in those locations, as per CNBC.

Shen claims that they already have enough advanced chips on hand for the portion of their operations to aid their business in the near future.

He further stated that Kunlun, Baidu's own AI chip, is coming in handy for the company. He said that Baidu has already begun using the Kunlun chip to support some significant internal AI computing workloads as well as providing services to third parties.

"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 in a statement quoted by CNBC.

After cost-cutting measures improved its bottom line, Baidu reported an increase in sales on Tuesday, Nov. 22. Despite difficult economic circumstances like Covid limitations and inflation, online advertising also performed better than anticipated.

Baidu's stock increased to 2.61% on Wednesday but is still down 35.7% for the year.

US Chip Bans

The US government has imposed bans on exporting sophisticated chips required for supercomputers and artificial intelligence to Russia and China, citing fears that they may be used for military objectives.

According to research released by the Center for Security in Emerging Technology, or CSET, China is progressing toward its goal of becoming a global powerhouse in artificial intelligence by 2030, thanks to chips developed by U.S. companies.

Based on 97 publicly available documents of the Chinese military's procurement of AI processors, nearly all of them were created by American firms Nvidia, Xilinx (now AMD), Intel, or Microsemi, as per the researcher's findings.

This article is owned by Tech Times

Written by Jace Dela Cruz