Bilibili Puts a Price Tag on AI — and Its Ad Engine Re-Accelerates to 30%
Q1 2026: advertising growth re-accelerates to 30% as AI advertisers double budgets, while management quantifies an RMB 1B AI CapEx year and pivots past the San Guo game base.
BILI · Earnings Call · 2026-05-19
Bilibili's first-quarter 2026 report is the moment its long-running AI narrative acquired a price tag — and the tag is meaningful. Headline revenue growth stayed modest at 7% YoY, but the center of gravity is the accelerating advertising engine and the first hard numbers on an AI bet management has been telegraphing for two quarters. The company's own keyword trajectory for the period shows advertising growth and AI investment both breaking into its top themes, and this time the buzzwords line up with disclosed dollars.
An ad engine firing on AI demand
The top-line story is advertising. “Our advertising revenue reported RMB 2.6 billion in the first quarter, up 30% year-over-year, marking our 13th consecutive quarter of double-digit growth.” — Juliet Yang, Executive Director of Investor Relations · 2026-05-19 That is a visible re-acceleration: three months earlier, on the Q4 2025 call, the same metric was pegged at 23% growth. “In Q3, our advertising revenue reached RMB 2.7 billion, up 23% year over year” — Rui Chen, Management · 2025-11-13 — so the move from 23% to 30% in two quarters is a deliberate, stated step-up. What changed? The AI application economy. “In the Internet services sector, AI advertisers kept scaling with ad budgets surging over 170% year-over-year.” — Rui Chen, Chief Executive Officer · 2026-05-19 The AI advertiser theme is not brand new — it carried momentum into this quarter — but the scale is: automated ad-spend penetration has reached roughly 85%, and performance-ad conversion (CTCVR) is up 25% YoY on better AI matching. Management framed it as a compounding loop: “the bigger value will come from the long-term transformation that AI can bring to us” — Juliet Yang, Executive Director of Investor Relations · 2026-05-19, not just near-term efficiency.AI gets a CapEx line
The structural shift is in the balance sheet, not just the narrative. “In Q1, our CapEx increased about 80% year-over-year around RMB 200 million... our AI-related CapEx to increase by approximately RMB 1 billion with an impact on P&L of around RMB 500 million.” — Xin Fan, Chief Financial Officer · 2026-05-19 Contrast that with the prior quarter's framing, when the CFO said the company would “modestly increase our investment in AI and reinvest partial of our incremental profit into AI applications” — Xin Fan, Management · 2026-03-05. "Modest" is gone; the number is now explicit, and management is offsetting it with OpEx discipline — sales & marketing down 1% YoY while R&D rose 9% ("primarily due to expanded AI investments"), holding total operating expenses to a 3% increase.The pivot is also a positioning choice. While the global tape rallies AI-infrastructure suppliers — AI data centers among the strongest 90-day advancers — Bilibili sits on the demand side of that boom: it is where AI companies go to acquire users, not where the compute gets built. Street pressure is already visible: one analyst on the call pushed for the timeline on meaningful AI returns, and the CFO answered that Q1 shows "initial results" in user growth, time spent, and ad revenue, with "positive feedback... just begun."This historical opportunity of AI can bring the opportunity that makes Bilibili 10x more valuable, and we will really invest and seize that opportunity for us.