Exclusive | In the race for cloud services, Baidu counts on AI for a competitive edge

Baidu, the operator of China’s biggest search engine, plans to leverage its know-how in artificial intelligence to gain a competitive edge in the race to develop cloud services, according to its president.

Declaring that the cloud business has moved away from competing on price for basic computing and storage services, the company known as China’s version of Google is counting on its machine learning, AI and big data analysis capabilities to help “businesses address real problems”, said Baidu president Zhang Yanqin.

“We don’t aim for the biggest, but we aim to provide corporate users with the most intelligent cloud,” Zhang said in an interview with the South China Morning Post in Shenzhen.

The remarks come as the Beijing-based search giant remains the smallest player among China’s tech trilogy known as BAT – Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent. Its cloud revenue is expected to reach 4 billion yuan (US$624 billion) by 2020, roughly 10 per cent of Alibaba Group’s same forecast and 14 per cent of Tencent’s, according to a research note by Deutsche Bank. Alibaba is the parent company of the Post.

“For cloud services, we don’t focus too much on revenue, but on the products and services themselves,” said the president. “The market potential will be multiple times bigger than the IT industry.”

Declining to comment on his competitors, Zhang said Baidu has no interest in taking part in a “price war” but hopes to provide value through AI and big data in the second phase of the cloud implementation.