Baidu unveils AI chip roadmap
Baidu Inc. on Thursday unveiled a sweeping five-year roadmap for its Kunlun artificial intelligence (AI) chips, outlining new products through 2030 and major upgrades to its large-scale computing clusters. The company said its M100 and M300 AI chips will debut in 2026 and 2027, respectively, with the M100 designed for inference and the M300 supporting both training and inference. It also plans to launch its next-generation N-series AI chips in 2029 and reach a one-million-card Kunlun chip cluster by 2030. The announcements came at Baidu World, the company’s annual conference in Beijing, where it also introduced its latest large model, Ernie 5.0. Baidu said the 2.4-trillion-parameter, multimodal model matches the language and perception capabilities of top global systems including Gemini-2.5-Pro and GPT-5-High.
Tencent says talks with Apple on WeChat game fees are advancing
Tencent Holdings Ltd. is making “constructive” progress in talks with Apple Inc. over how to share revenue from mini-games on its WeChat app. “We have been discussing with Apple how to build a more active mini-game ecosystem, and we are constructive about the progress so far,” Tencent President Martin Lau said during the company’s third-quarter earnings call Thursday. “There will be a formal announcement in the future.” Market rumors last August suggested Apple was pressuring Tencent to close loopholes that allowed users to make payments outside its system. At the time, Tencent said it was negotiating with Apple over fee arrangements for mini-games on iOS.
JD.com’s third-quarter profit falls on delivery gamble
JD.com Inc. beat revenue expectations in the third quarter, but profits took a hit as the Chinese e-commerce giant upped investment in its fledgling food delivery unit. The U.S.- and Hong Kong-listed firm reported revenue of 299.1 billion yuan ($42 billion) for the three months ended Sept. 30, a 14.9% increase from a year earlier, exceeding market forecasts. However, net profit attributable to shareholders fell 54.7% to 5.3 billion yuan as spending on emerging businesses more than doubled marketing outlays. The results underscore JD.com’s aggressive strategy to compete in high-frequency consumer services such as food delivery — an effort designed to drive user growth and boost traffic to its core retail platform.
Bilibili reports record-breaking user metrics in third quarter
Bilibili Inc.’s third-quarter revenue growth slowed sharply even as its profit surged and user engagement hit new highs. The Chinese video streaming platform on reported total revenue of 7.69 billion yuan, a 5% year-on-year increase, down from the over 20% growth rate maintained over the previous year. It posted a net profit of 470 million yuan, swinging from a loss a year earlier. During the summer, monthly active users reached 376 million, daily active users totaled 117.3 million and average daily time a user spent on the platform was 112 minutes — all hitting new highs.
