The leading Chinese tech company Baidu has announced that it will be investing more money in supercomputing technologies.
Baidu's President announced the news in a Bloomberg TV interview, saying: “Voice recognition, picture recognition, machine translation, deep learning and neural networks and all those things will make us competitive in the long term.”
The company intends to embark on a merger and acquisition spree of such technology companies in order to get ahead of its main competitors Tencent and Alibaba.
In the last year, Baidu, which is most famous for its search engine, has been diversifying its products.
In 2015, Baidu said that it would invest over 3 billion US dollars in online-to-offline services in the next 3 years, and according to CEO Robin Li, the company's future lies in services, rather than searching.
Online-to-offline services are those which allow users to do a real-world activity online, such as taxi-hailing and ticket-booking apps.
Baidu's focus on online-to-offline services has been put down to the increasing penetration of smartphones in the Chinese market.Â
