Yu Kai of Horizon: Smart Cars Enter "Showdown Phase," Domestic Chipmakers Push for Mainstream Adoption

At the China Auto Chongqing Forum held on June 12–13, 2026, Yu Kai, founder and CEO of Horizon Robotics, delivered a speech stating that the intelligent vehicle industry has transitioned from a “dream-building phase” to an “accountability phase,” where the market now prioritizes companies’ tangible value creation over future visions. He noted that consumers and investors are increasingly evaluating company performance based on metrics such as revenue growth, gross margins, and market competitiveness. Yu emphasized that automakers developing their own chips—including Li Auto, NIO, XPeng, and BYD—share Horizon’s goal of making domestically produced chips dominant in the intelligent vehicle market. Reflecting on Horizon’s development journey, he explained that the company initially adopted a “surrounding cities from rural areas” strategy by entering the low-to-mid computing power segment and has now advanced into high-computing domains. Horizon recently launched its Journey 6P chip with 560 TOPS of computing power and is concurrently developing the HSD urban NOA (Navigate on Autopilot) solution to establish benchmark standards for intelligent driving. Data shows that among vehicles priced between RMB 100,000 and 200,000 equipped with Horizon’s solutions, consumers overwhelmingly opt for higher-trim configurations, and autonomous driving mileage accounts for nearly 50% of total vehicle mileage. Moreover, despite an overall downturn in the automotive market, Horizon continues to gain relative market share in the autonomous driving domain controller chip segment. Yu also introduced Horizon’s new integrated cockpit-and-driving chip, “Stellar,” designed for central computing and in-vehicle AI agents. By consolidating driving and cockpit domain controllers, Stellar reduces memory usage by approximately 20GB, helping automakers cut costs by RMB 2,000–4,000 per vehicle. Additionally, Horizon has established four core business segments—chips, software algorithms, intelligent cockpits, and intelligent driving—and unveiled its next-generation cockpit operating system, “KakaXia OS.” Horizon currently positions itself as “an enabler of full-category intelligent computing solutions for Chinese automakers,” committed to co-creating value with OEMs and ecosystem partners to address industry challenges.