Li Auto will sign a strategic partnership with NVIDIA and Huizhou Desay SV Auto on September 22, at the Li Auto Beijing Delivery Center, according to autohome.com.
The signing will be attended by Li Auto's newly appointed CTO, Wang Kai, NVIDIA's President of China, and Desay SV Auto's General Manager.
The assisted driving chip used by Li Auto is from Mobileye, model number EyeQ4, while the assisted driving software is developed in collaboration with Yihang Intelligence.
As for the new strategic partnership, it is widely speculated that Li Auto will switch its next-generation computing hardware from Mobileye's EyeQ4 to NVIDIA's Orin, which can increase its computing power from 2.5TOPS to 200TOPS.
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Li Auto will also develop its driver-assist software through a partnership with Desay SV Auto.
If the new assisted driving chip is indeed the rumored one, it will mean a fundamental change in Li Auto's entire assisted driving system.
Four years ago Tesla also switched its assist chip from Mobileye EyeQ3 to NVIDIA's Drive PX2, while Tesla's Autopilot 1.0 iteration became Autopilot 2.0, along with a major change in its assist hardware architecture.
The partnership with NVIDIA and Desay SV Auto may indicate that Li Auto is working on the next generation of advanced driver assistance hardware.
With the recent addition of Wang Kai, Li Auto's development of intelligent technologies is accelerating.
Wang Kai has 18 years of R&D and management experience in the automotive and mobile phone industries, and Li Xiang describes Wang Kai as "a top architect with comprehensive and extensive hands-on experience in chips, systems, software, electrical and electronic architecture, smart cabin, and automated driving."
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