On April 10, Baidu Apollo donated a fleet of autonomous vehicles to Beijing Jiaotong University, along with a complete autonomous driving system. The donation includes extensive source code and tools to support the university's teaching and research activities. Baidu Apollo serves as a platform with both scientific research and practical application value, and has been widely adopted in areas such as logistics distribution, sanitation cleaning, and passenger transport.

In 2017, the Ministry of Science and Technology designated Baidu to develop a national-level open innovation platform for next-generation artificial intelligence in autonomous driving. Since then, Baidu Apollo has engaged in a range of initiatives related to autonomous driving ecosystem development, open-source collaboration, industrial empowerment, academic competitions, and talent cultivation.

In 2025, Baidu Apollo launched the Spark Initiative and began donating autonomous vehicles and experimental platforms in batches to several universities, including Wuhan University, Xiangjiang Laboratory, Beijing Technology and Business University, Zhejiang University, Dalian University of Technology, Fudan University, Tongji University, and Beihang University.