NIO CEO William Li announced on August 24 that Ren Shaoqing, the company's head of intelligent driving, has founded an independent company focused on physical AI foundation models and embodied intelligence. NIO will make a strategic investment in the new company and collaborate with it, while Ren Shaoqing will continue to be fully responsible for NIO's intelligent driving business, with no change in his position or responsibilities. This move aims to participate in the robotics field through investment and cooperation rather than launching new internal businesses, in order to balance profitability and return on investment, and to leverage NIO's布局 in areas such as intelligent driving chips to find customers for edge inference scenarios like robotics.