{"id":22201,"date":"2026-01-09T08:09:08","date_gmt":"2026-01-09T06:09:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jhb-webdevelopers\/channelafrica\/news\/chinese-automaker-xpeng-touts-ai-pivot-in-face-of-fierce-competition\/"},"modified":"2026-02-27T16:33:15","modified_gmt":"2026-02-27T14:33:15","slug":"chinese-automaker-xpeng-touts-ai-pivot-in-face-of-fierce-competition","status":"publish","type":"news","link":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/news\/chinese-automaker-xpeng-touts-ai-pivot-in-face-of-fierce-competition\/","title":{"rendered":"Chinese automaker Xpeng touts AI pivot in face of fierce competition"},"content":{"rendered":"<div>He Xiaopeng, Founder and Chief Executive of the company, one of China&#8217;s best-selling electric vehicle startups and a Volkswagen partner says with automakers facing intense competition, integrated AI capabilities with XPeng&#8217;s in-house &#8220;Turing&#8221; AI chip will give it an advantage.<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>\u201cXPeng definitely does not want to become a car company that simply sells hardware cheaply,&#8221; he said at an event in Guangzhou. &#8220;We want to become a global technology company, a company with strong differentiation,&#8221; he added.<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>The effort to reposition itself echoes similar efforts by Elon Musk&#8217;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.<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>Reuters&#8211;<\/div>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":22202,"template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"news-type":[44],"class_list":["post-22201","news","type-news","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","news-type-finance","entry"],"acf":{"short_description":"Chinese automaker, Xpeng said it wanted to become better known as a \u201cphysical AI\u201d company rather than just a carmaker, as it gears up to launch street trials of robotaxis and start mass producing humanoid robots later this year","published_date":"2026-01-09 00:00:00","news_description":"Chinese automaker, Xpeng said it wanted to become better known as a \u201cphysical AI\u201d company rather than just a carmaker, as it gears up to launch street trials of robotaxis and start mass producing humanoid robots later this year","form_embed":"","author":"","image_caption":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news\/22201","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/news"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news\/22201\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":25580,"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news\/22201\/revisions\/25580"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/22202"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22201"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"news-type","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news-type?post=22201"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}