Chery Signs Intensive Cooperation Deals with Five Global Giants to Restructure Intelligent Automotive Technology Ecosystem

At the just-concluded 2026 Beijing International Automotive Exhibition, Chinese independent brand Chery Automobile staged a grand "feast" of high-profile strategic cooperation. Within just a few days, Chery successively signed in-depth cooperation agreements with five global leading enterprises — NVIDIA, Bosch, Qualcomm, Volcano Engine, and CATL — covering five core areas: underlying electrical architecture, intelligent driving computing power, cockpit chips, cloud-based AI, and energy supplement network. Through an innovative model of joint development and standard co-construction, the company aims to restructure the intelligent automotive technology ecosystem, becoming one of the most watched industry events at this year's auto show.

Different from the simple procurement cooperation of traditional automakers, the five strategic cooperation deals reached by Chery this time all highlight the characteristic of "in-depth binding." At the level of underlying technical architecture, after 18 months of pre-research and prototype verification, Chery officially signed an agreement with Bosch on the joint development and mass production of a 48V vehicle architecture. This breakthrough overcomes the power bottleneck of the traditional 12V architecture, increasing the vehicle's power supply to 15 kilowatts, reducing the system weight by more than 10 kilograms, and improving the response speed of the steer-by-wire chassis motor by over 20%, providing key support for the stable operation of advanced intelligent driving and steer-by-wire systems. In the field of intelligent driving computing power, Chery entered into a global strategic cooperation with NVIDIA, which will equip L3/L4-level intelligent vehicles for the Chinese market with NVIDIA's DRIVE Hyperion platform. It will also enter the humanoid robot track through the Jetson platform, building an all-scenario AI layout from the cloud to the vehicle end.

The upgrade of cockpit and intelligent interaction experience has become a highlight of this cooperation. Chery has fully upgraded its cooperation with Qualcomm and will adopt the Snapdragon Digital Chassis product portfolio, including the Snapdragon Cockpit Platform Premium Edition, Snapdragon Ride Platform Premium Edition, and Snapdragon Ride Flex SoC for central computing architecture, covering the intelligent upgrading needs of multi-brand and multi-level models. More notably, the cooperation between Chery and Volcano Engine will fully integrate ByteDance's Doubao Large Model into the vehicle end, comprehensively upgrading Chery's super AI agent "Xiaoqi Tongxue" (Little Qi). This upgrade will enhance its semantic understanding, long-term memory, and emotional interaction capabilities, while connecting content ecosystems such as Douyin and Toutiao to realize scenario-based proactive intelligent services.

In terms of energy supplement system construction, the cooperation between Chery and CATL has been upgraded from simple battery supply to joint construction of a battery swapping network, officially promoting the implementation of the vehicle-battery separation model. According to the agreement, Chery will intensively launch a number of battery-swappable models, transforming batteries from traditional cost items into operational assets of the battery swapping network, and building an efficient energy supplement ecosystem combined with CATL's technological advantages.

Industry analysts point out that the core significance of Chery's intensive signing this time lies in breaking the "party A and party B" relationship between traditional automakers and suppliers. By deeply participating in the scheme definition stage, Chery has mastered the dominant power of product definition and embarked on a transformation path of "focusing on vehicle engineering and system integration, and cooperating with leading partners to tackle core modules." This model not only avoids the cash flow pressure brought by full independent research and development but also maintains the dominant power of core technologies, providing a new paradigm for industry transformation. Data shows that Chery's R&D investment in the first quarter of 2026 reached 2.85 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 25.5%, and the implementation of this series of cooperation will further consolidate its technical foundation.

It is worth noting that behind this series of strategic cooperation lies Chery's global layout intention. With the launch of overseas regional operation centers and the advancement of localization strategies, the world-leading technical solutions of the five partners will form an exportable and replicable global technical support system, helping Chery enhance its competitiveness in the global market. Currently, China's new energy vehicle industry is in a critical transition period from "scale expansion" to "quality improvement." The "hardware + software" dual-drive technology ecosystem built by Chery this time will not only accelerate its transformation into an intelligent new-quality productive force enterprise but also provide important reference for China's automotive industry to break through core technical bottlenecks and enhance its voice in the global industrial chain.