Baidu sees Buy rating maintained at BofA on AI upside

BofA Securities maintained its Buy rating on Baidu (NASDAQ:BIDU) citing AI upside for the company. Earlier this week, the Chinese internet search giant said its generative AI chat tool Ernie Bot surpassed over 200M users. Over 85,000 enterprise clients used Qianfan, Baidu AI Cloud’s foundation model platform, to create 190,000 AI applications, the company had noted on the sidelines of the Create 2024 Baidu AI Developer Conference. Analyst Miranda Zhuang said that the conference showed Baidu’s efforts to boost the AI adoption by lowering the entry barrier, reducing costs, and increasing computing efficiency. Baidu also introduced a set of zero/low-code…