Chery casts itself as an AI company, unveils CheryMind physical-AI model
At the 2026 Chery Global Innovation Conference on October 20, chairman Yin Tongyue said Chery is "an AI technology company wearing an automaker's vest," arguing that companies which refuse to rebuild themselves with AI will be eliminated, while humans still hold responsibility and judgment that AI cannot replace, according to IT Home's on-site report. Chery also announced its "Yaoguang 2035" strategy to evolve from a traditional automaker into an AI-driven global technology company, and unveiled CheryMind, a vertical foundation model positioned "for physical AI," per iFangr and Geek Park. Chery says CheryMind draws on 700TB of enterprise knowledge, 200PB of engineering data, 25 million driving clips and 5 million robot motion-capture clips, and that it already connects more than 400 enterprise systems and 1,500 end-to-end business processes with over 60,000 employee uses per day — figures attributed to the company. Coverage also describes the Ziwei C100 central-compute chip, planned for 2027 with dual-chip NPU compute of 2,400 TOPS, and the CHERY AWE world-model engine for driver assistance.
The event shows a major Chinese automaker publicly repositioning itself around AI models and self-developed chips, with capability and timeline figures that remain company claims pending independent verification.