He Xiaopeng, Founder and Chief Executive of the company, one of China’s best-selling electric vehicle startups and a Volkswagen partner says with automakers facing intense competition, integrated AI capabilities with XPeng’s in-house “Turing” AI chip will give it an advantage.
“XPeng definitely does not want to become a car company that simply sells hardware cheaply,” he said at an event in Guangzhou. “We want to become a global technology company, a company with strong differentiation,” he added.
The effort to reposition itself echoes similar efforts by Elon Musk’s Tesla to expand into making humanoid robots and robotaxis as part of a sharp rise in the use of AI globally. Underlining growing interest in physical AI, chip technology company Arm Holdings told Reuters this week that it had reorganized to create a physical AI unit to expand its presence in the robotics market. Another Chinese automaker, Li Auto in 2023 unveiled a repositioning towards AI, with founder Li Xiang saying that it had invested more than 6 billion Yuan ($859.1 million) in AI models, computing power and infrastructure annually.
Reuters–
