Investing.com -- Baidu shares rose more than 2% in premarket trading Monday after the Chinese internet giant reported first-quarter revenue and earnings that topped analyst expectations, with its AI-powered business emerging as a key growth driver.

Revenue came in at 32.08 billion yuan, ahead of the 31.49 billion yuan consensus estimate. Adjusted profit per American depositary receipt of 12.06 yuan edged past the 11.84 yuan forecast.

Baidu Core AI-powered business generated revenue of 13.6 billion yuan, up 49% year-over-year, while the broader Baidu General Business contributed 26 billion yuan in revenue, with adjusted operating profit of 3.95 billion yuan.

"In Q1, our Core AI-powered Business exceeded half of Baidu General Business revenue for the first time, marking a clear signal that AI has become the core driver of Baidu," said CEO Robin Li in a statement.

Baidu said its cloud infrastructure revenue surged 79% year-on-year to 8.8 billion yuan in the first quarter, with GPU cloud revenue more than tripling, up 184%. AI applications revenue was broadly flat at 2.5 billion yuan.

iQIYI, the company’s streaming unit, posted revenue of 6.23 billion yuan, slightly below the 6.43 billion yuan consensus.

The company’s adjusted operating profit of 3.81 billion yuan and adjusted EBITDA of 5.95 billion yuan both cleared expectations of 3.34 billion yuan and 5.23 billion yuan, respectively.