According to reports in Chinese local media, Baidu announced a strategic investment in Dalian Neusoft Holding Co., Ltd., with a total investment of CNY1.443 billion.

With the strategic investment, the two parties formally reached a strategic cooperation partnership and they will work together in key sectors, including intelligent city, intelligent education, and intelligent medical, to promote the reform of industrial intelligence. At the same time, Baidu's CTO Wang Haifeng will be director of Neusoft.

Neusoft Holding is a high-tech investment and management enterprise which invests in information technology, medical and healthcare, and education and training. The company's investment layout covers many industries like medical and healthcare, intelligent car interconnection, intelligent city, enterprise interconnection, medical equipment, cloud hospital, and education. At the same time, Neusoft Group is the first listed software company in China with current market value of CNY15.7 billion.

Baidu is one of the earliest high-tech enterprises to distribute in the artificial intelligent sector and the company has leading technology strength in key sectors, including big data, deep learning, speech, image recognition, natural language processing, knowledge map, autopilot, and cloud computing. The strategic cooperation with Neusoft is an important landmark for Baidu's AI scale realization. It is also a milestone for its accelerated intelligence upgrade in sectors like intelligent city and intelligent medical.